Of course, building/prototyping hardware CAN be more expensive, but thinking of software development as "cheap" just because you can get a PC for ~$200 - yeah, well, no... not really.
You got it, building and prototyping hardware is more expensive period. Software development will always be cheaper on matching complexity levels. Even disregarding the ~$200 PC, going for a ~$1000 and adding a ~$50000 for development tools, you will still always come out ahead with SW development. Decent tools for hardware development does not come cheap, and considering the free tools for sw development its easier to cut cost there.
And after the initial investment, you only burn man hours with sw development. The compile-debug-compile cycles only cost time, where in hardware development each successive round of prototypes add the cost of parts and production. Not to mention the delay after the prototype design is finished until you get the produced part. If you think a 20min compile time is bad, try waiting one to eight weeks for your prototype before you can start testing and debugging it.
Do you have a source for that statement?
What about the PyGTK and GTK websites. According to the download links the latest stable and updated PyGTK are for GTK 2.14, and GTK 2.16 has been out since the middle of March. For PyQt you don't find many minor releases of Qt that has not been followed by a updated PyQt release inside a week or two, for the last 5 years or so.
As for being comprehensive, the Qt bindings(at least PyQt) has a close to full coverage of the Qt classes. Last I checked PyGTK did not offer the same. And since Qt are not only a GUI library, the difference gets even larger as the bindings provide so much more.
that's why its no longer the official kde media player.
Basicly your whole commnet is utter nonsens, reaching a high point by this part of the comment. Amarok have never been the official KDE media player. In KDE2 and 3 the official mediaplayer was Noatun(In later releases you also got the choice of JuK for audio).
For KDE 4 users, JuK is the default media player for audio media. While Dragon Player is the default for video. Both are great applications, preforming their task well. Interrestingly many of the load complainers against Amaroks design, describe the way JuK works. Go figure.
Qt is nice, but its licensing prevents Google from using it in this way. To use Qt, Google would need to either pay for a license,
This would be no problem. Fact is, Google already does exactly this for other products.
but it wouldn't be transferable to others,
??? What are you talking about? Companies sell, eg transfer, software developed with Qt all the time, it's what is made for after all. Obviously the license allow it.
or Chrome would need to be GPLed. Google goes to great effort to license it's code under the Apache/BSD/etc. licenses whenever possible, as it considers this better for it's business (and that's a reasonable position to take).
No need for GPL, you can freely use Qt with a wide range of open source licenses like Apache/BSD/etc. Please check your facts. http://doc.trolltech.com/4.4/license-gpl-exceptions.html
Life is a healthy respect for mother nature laced with greed.