Why not Qt4? (hi, Drew! was: Efforts to attract more users?)

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Trimming the absurd CC list.

Bernardo Barros writes:

 > many people in the gnu world are using qt4. are there reasons not to
 > consider it?

A short summary:

- There are already Emacs implementations for all platforms supported
  by Qt4.

- Qt is not a GNU project, some of the already supported toolkits are.

- TrollTech's position on licensing is suspect.  Doesn't bother me in
  theory, actually, as I believe that Qt should be considered part
  of the OS[1] where available, but I suspect many core developers
  would be wary of any dependency on a company with a history of
  non-free licensing.

I think Qt is a non-starter, except as a bikeshed-painting exercise.

Footnotes: 
[1]  By analogy to Motif.  Note that AFAIK the official position of
GNU and the FSF is clear that toolkits like GTK+ and Qt are *not* part
of any free OS.  Therefore they must be distributed under GPL-compatible
licenses to be linked to Emacs.