What the parent suggested was not using QT and not paying the company that makes it, but that its price makes it unusable for their purposes.
(Now, that might have been based on a misunderstanding of the licensing involved, but ignoring that, the point still stands. If one had to pay $5000 for a GUI library, and one didn't have $5000, then one could look elsewhere...).
$5000 is not the price for small developers by the way.
It is licensed under the LGPL though (however much its current owners may want to change this, they can't because of the KDE Free Qt agreement), which means you don't have to pay. All you have to do is dynamically link to the library instead of statically linking.
The major contributors for Qt have always been the same regardless of the legal name of Qt owner.
It is quite easy decision process, don't want to pay for Qt's development, use LGPL and GPL variants earn as much money as one is willing to give upstream.
Decide to go commercial, then pay accordingly upstream.
> Decide to go commercial, then pay accordingly upstream.
Hmm. The commercial license actually prohibits starting development under one of the open source licenses then switching to commercial. If you start under an open source license, you'll need to abide by the LGPL if you decide to go closed source (and of course what you've already released remains open source).
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LGPLStaticVsDyn...
Note that does not necessarily require “your code” to be/come open source.
Wasn't there talks about ending the lgpl version ? I thought I read somewhere that KDE devs were quite worried.
As far as I can tell from that the LGPLv3 seems to be required under the current terms of the agreement.