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A comment on Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem.

Re:Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem by jordigh on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @10:55AM (#8142741)
Dear lazyweb, what exactly is Qt's current business? The blog post makes it sound as if the commercial version of Qt wasn't free software. What freedoms does it take away? I know that Trolltech commercialised Qt by selling exceptions. What's the current business? Also, if 25% of all contributions are coming from non-Digia employees, does Digia require copyright assignment? Does their current commercial model require copyright assignments?
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Re:Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem by cbhl on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @11:08AM (#8142823)
Qt is licensed under GPL v3 and LGPL v2.1, but you can also buy a license if you want to use and/or modify Qt in a project without having to redistribute the whole thing under GPLv3 or redistribute your modified Qt under LGPL v2.1.

There's actually a lot of closed-source software you know of that uses Qt in some form: Autodesk Maya, Google Earth, Skype, and Spotify are just a few.

I'm not sure whether all of these teams use the commercial version (some may use e.g. the LGPL version) but it's probably not zero.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)#Software_using_Qt

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Re:Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem by jordigh on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @11:19AM (#8142886)
So they're back to selling exceptions again? I thought they had stopped when it was owned by Nokia.
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Re:Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem by milliams on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @11:32AM (#8142975)
The deal was that before Nokia Qt was GPL or commercial but after Nokia bought it they relicensed the open-source offering to LGPL. This obviously reduced the demand for the commercial version but there's still plenty of companies who would buy it for both license and support.
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Re:Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem by navlelo on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @11:28AM (#8142942)
The commercial business/licensing was sold off to Digia, which eventually bought the whole Qt division.
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Re:Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem by jordigh on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @11:38AM (#8143014)
Yes, I understand this, but Digia went back to GPL and back to selling GPL exceptions like Trolltech did originally?
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Re:Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem by toyg on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @11:57AM (#8143136)
Digia is doing the same thing Nokia did, which was the same thing Trolltech did. The only difference is that, since the Nokia takeover, the open source version is also available under LGPL. This has not changed under Digia.
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Re:Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem by Narishma on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @01:05PM (#8143480)
They never stopped selling commercial licenses, so there's nothing to go back to. The only thing that changed with Nokia is that they made it also available with an LGPL license.
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Re:Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem by milliams on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @11:52AM (#8143102)
No. it's still available under the LGPL.
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Re:Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem by avar on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @11:06AM (#8142809)
Yes, they release it under GPL/LGPL and make their money on proprietary licenses for users that can't or won't use those licenses. If you want to develop Qt itself and get your changes included you have to sign a copyright assignment agreement that gives Digia the right to re-license your work. See:

    http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/licensing.html
    http://qt-project.org/legal.html
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Re:Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem by milliams on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @11:08AM (#8142819)
They sell a commercial version without any restrictions on usage. In order to accommodate this they do have a copyright license to Digia (https://codereview.qt-project.org/static/cla_individual.html).
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Re:Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem by jordigh on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @11:35AM (#8142991)
> They sell a commercial version without any restrictions on usage.

I understand I can't give it to my friends? That's would be a restriction that free software/open source doesn't have.

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Re:Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem by milliams on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @11:54AM (#8143116)
You can give it to your friends since all you have is a license to use the source-code under different conditions. It's the same source either way, just you have a special license. Your friends don't have that license and so presumably would be bound by the LGPL.
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Re:Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem by jordigh on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @12:06PM (#8143182)
Apparently not all of it, there are some non-free addons not available under a free license.
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Re:Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem by zanny on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @11:31AM (#8142961)
They also have a bunch of addon packs that are proprietary-only. A few of them would be really useful in the free software community too, which sucks, like their graphing QML library.
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Re:Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem by jordigh on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @11:34AM (#8142988)
So the commercial version indeed is not open source at all? I can't buy the commercial version and give it to my friends? Hm. That's a pity.
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Re:Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem by milliams on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @11:56AM (#8143124)
Two separate things:

1) The Qt source code. Available under GPL, LGPL or commercial license

2) Some extra proprietary addons. Only available under the commercial license.

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Re:Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem by jordigh on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @12:11PM (#8143203)
I don't get it, why would anyone buy an LGPL exception? They want to keep their own private Qt fork and keep the modifications to Qt locked up? Is the cost of maintaining a private fork really that profitable and much lower than the cost of buying an LGPL exception?

I'm just surprised that's a good business model too. I don't quite understand it. Maybe there's something I could read instead of asking the lazyweb?

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Re:Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem by zanny on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @12:16PM (#8143240)
You don't need to read much, the answer is simple: legal departments.

For most companies, the lawyers don't understand the LGPL or software at all, so they don't understand that the LGPL lets the company distribute binaries with Qt libraries included without any source release requirements. They just need to include a notice that Qt is used and where to get the LGPL parts source.

They just like being able to pay money and "own" the IP.

The only time a company actually needs the commercial option is when they distribute in house modified Qt libraries, because those would be derivative works. And I would really want to know why the hell any company thinks its worth it to buy a commercial license so they don't have to release their modifications to Qt itself. That is just ridiculous.

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Re:Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem by FigBug on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @01:07PM (#8143500)
LGPL isn't compatible with app stores since the user can't relink. So you need a commercial license.

As well, the licensing cost of the enterprise license is $200 a month, that's so cheap compared to a developers salary there isn't a lot of reason not to get it.

Then you can do a static link and make your application a lot smaller (depending on what parts of Qt you actually use) and make installation simpler.

I really like Qt, but I don't use it for a lot of my simple commandline apps because it would turn what could be a <500KB single .exe into a .exe that requires a few MB of DLLs.

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Re:Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem by pavlov on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @12:31PM (#8143288)
LGPL allows only dynamic linking, i.e. the Qt libraries must remain separately loaded binaries and cannot be included into another project in object form.

I could see some reasons why a company would want to statically link Qt libraries into a larger binary. For that they'll need the commercial license.

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Re:Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem by __david__ on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @07:59PM (#8145566)
That's not precisely correct. You can statically link proprietary code with LGPL code and even distribute it, but you must also distribute the object code such that the user can re-link against newer/changed versions of the library to create a new static binary.
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