earlier this year nokia, which bought out trolltech last year, announced that they would release the qt library under lgpl (press release). this was great news for any company that wanted to sell a commercial c++ application with a qt-enabled frontend without release all of their sources. my understanding with companies is that it's not they are not willing to pay for use of the source code; its that the per-developer licensing model which qt employed was simply too high for most companies. unfortunately, riverbank computing, which develops pyqt, the python bindings to qt, did not feel the same way, and continues to license pyqt under the old model.
pyside is nokia's effort at bringing python bindings to qt. it looks like they are using boost python to accomplish the task, making the task that much more daunting. pyside currently does not support python 3.0, windows, or mac os x, thereby minimizing its usefulness for many use cases, and defeats the cross-platform-ness of qt. i understand that it satisfies nokia's corporate needs however, as their products are linux based.
it would be a share for pyside to not expand its coverage. i suspect that nokia will put in that effort, albeit at a slow crawl. i also wonder whether nokia considered the option to buy out riverbank computing, the way they did for trolltech. perhaps they are introducing pyside as a way to disarm riverbank before any such negotiations. time will tell what happens.
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