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0 pointsgmueckl4y ago0 comments

They can't just stop licensing the core of Qt under GPL or LGPL (I forget which) due to an old agreement between Trolltech and KDE e.V. that states (roughly) that if there are no more OSS releases of Qt for more than a year, the last public release gets automatically relicensed under something more liberal (BSD or MIT).

But the Qt Company has tried to make using the open source releases more and more inconvenient: licensing terms for the commercial version that are not at all forthcoming to OSS-to-commercial converts (implying that you need to pay for commercial licenses from the start), more limited access to precompiled binaries and registration obligations when you want to use the official Qt installer. That behavior seems to say that the company is bound by an agreement that they honor only reluctantly.

0 pointsgmueckl4y ago0 comments

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5 comments · 2 top-level

zxspectrum19824y ago· 3 in thread

No, that's not true. The Qt Company makes stuff open source but it's open source under a license (GPL) you don't like because you want LGPL or even something more liberal that would allow you to use Qt for free in your closed-sourced application.

hnaccount1414y ago

Qt is licensed under LGPL v3

https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/licensing.html

zxspectrum19824y ago

LGPLv3 is useless for people developing proprietary applications, which was what I was answering to. Those people want LGPLv2.1, which is how Qt used to be licensed during Nokia times.

1 more reply

ptx4y ago

> No, that's not true.

Which part is not true? It all looks correct to me.

MaxBarraclough4y ago

To put that another way then: they seem to feel they have some freedom to decide which components should be covered by the KDE agreement.

(To put a finer point on the specifics you mentioned: I believe they once had a policy of making the QML-to-C++ compiler available only to commercial customers, and not to FOSS users, treating it as something distinct from the 'core of Qt'. They later changed their minds on this. [0][1])

Presumably they could start work on a whole new toolkit, call it something other than Qt, and be free of the KDE agreement. This would no doubt be much more work than a typical major Qt release, but they do presumably have the option.

[0] https://www.qt.io/blog/the-new-qt-quick-compiler-is-coming-i...

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9448296/is-qml-translate...

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