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.
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.