Today they might limit themselves to forced registration, SEO, and spamming business contacts with carefully crafted statements designed to stir fear, uncertainty, and doubt around free licenses by strongly suggesting (without actually claiming) that commercial use without a commercial license is illegal. But tomorrow? Also, keep in mind that a business partner who isn't already familiar with Qt and LGPL is going to be about 10x more susceptible to the FUD. That's the whole idea.
My guess: 30% chance of an ugly fork and lots of drama in the next few years. Then, absent a change in direction, another 30% chance in the few years after that, and so on.
https://dot.kde.org/2016/01/13/qt-guaranteed-stay-free-and-o...
We don't even use Qt. I was just evaluating it. A year before they "reached out."
I still see that as a strike against Qt, even though I understand that the existence of a technically free fork is effectively guaranteed.
That's charitable. The FUD is consistent, persistent, and targeted enough that I'd call it "intentionally deceptive."
Monetizing open source is hard. Maybe this is necessary, and if it is, maybe that's fair. But it's also fair to stay away because of it.
https://www.qt.io/download-open-source?hsCtaTracking=9f6a217...
If this were the extent of the shenanigans, I wouldn't be mad. I like having a "help me sell this to my boss" page. But it isn't the extent of the shenanigans. They went around me to shake someone down on my behalf (as I perceive it). Last time it was my boss. Next time I choose a GUI framework for an open source side project, I'll primarily worry about it being my users.
Where does it say that? Can you mention what he is having trouble with? I just took a quick glance at that link in GP and it seems to spell out the obligations of the LGPL pretty clearly on the right side, which are somewhat specific and notably don't include a requirement for your program to be open source. That requirement is only for the GPL components, which is included in the small print on the left.
Making this inference requires you to not only have outside knowledge of open source licenses and the Qt licensing situation, but to be rather confident in said outside knowledge. That's what he had trouble with.
I think that detail about GPL could be easily missed because it's written in small print, but that's a different problem. There are a lot of Qt components so it doesn't make sense to list them all on that page. A full list that can be filtered by LGPL/GPL status is here: https://www.qt.io/features
I'm assuming by outside knowledge you mean the fine print of the license: how is any company supposed to prevent your boss from having to go over that with a lawyer? This isn't even an open source thing, it applies to anyone in the software business. And this is ignoring that the GPL is probably one of the better understood open source licenses at the moment.
The key piece of information is absent.
> it seems to do as good a job as a short marketing page probably could
It could have done better in a single short sentence by stating the key piece of information, rather than leaving it to be inferred laboriously from a pile of details.
> It's not a place where they can reasonably address every common misconception
No, but it could have addressed the single largest misconception. It chose not to.
So Macs are out of question... Can't be signed can they?
What if we get a commercial license? Apple disallowes GPL...
Can't support GTK either, Expat Licensed GUI alternatives please...(I suggest Godot but it comes with a bit of pain and some baggage as well)
There are also other corner cases that they might want to cover, with more documentation.(Not sure if I have missed something)
If anyone has more info pls do share it. :)
... you know that even Apple ships some GPL software on every Mac right ? GPL is 100% fine mac hardware. There are even GPL apps on the appstore. Signing does not prevent you to upload a new version of the app to your own device.
Are you sure they're GPL?
Maybe they're dual-licensed, and the Apple app store is using "the other licence"?
Seem you're right. :)
Am very surprised, after reports a while back of GPL (etc) apps not being approved.
Hopefully they continue to be approved (etc). :)
it was an issue until Xcode 7 : prior to that you had to pay 99$ to Apple for the right of uploading something to your own iDevice. Since Xcode 7 this is not necessary anymore.
> https://github.com/peter-iakovlev/Telegram/issues/157
> http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/
> https://thenextweb.com/dd/2019/06/04/why-does-macos-catalina...
To my knowlage and IANAL, this is only possible with older pre-v3 licenses. v3 licenses specifically prohibit tevoisation, something that Apple's App store TOS effectively mandates by placing restrictions on what App users are allowed to do. I believe this is why apple doesn't ship recent versions of Bash.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
there are no issues with modifying, recompiling a GPLv3 app and uploading & running it on your own iPhone, iPad or Mac - it's not tivoization.
* https://www.fsf.org/news/2010-05-app-store-compliance
* https://www.zdnet.com/article/no-gpl-apps-for-apples-app-sto...
If I'm mistaken please clarify.
A business partner has enough money to actually pay for licenses.
I'm currently close to prealpha, if you're interested. https://github.com/cztomsik/graffiti/
> To name just a few things you usually don't need: ... flawless i18n & accessibility
Lack of basic accessibility support is (or should be) a complete nonstarter for any serious project.