Qt 4.5+ To Be Relicensed Under LGPL

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Qt 4.5+ To Be Relicensed Under LGPL

Last January when KDE 4 was released it was shared by Trolltech that Qt would be relicensed under the GNU GPLv3. Less than two weeks after that announcement, Nokia acquired Trolltech, the company behind the Qt tool-kit...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=Njk5Mg

[_txf_]

Just a Small correction,

Kdelibs were already licensed under lgpl.

This meant that you could develop closed source apps, provided you had a commercial Qt license

[curaga]

I wonder how Nokia believes letting people develop commercially (closed source) without paying for Qt anymore is a viable solution, especially seeing how the whole company has been in downhill for some time.

[RealNC]

Strange news indeed. Personally, I love the change since I'm working on a port of a free (as in beer, shared source) app and want to use Qt but the GPL wouldn't let me, but it's weird that Nokia went this way. What's the big picture here?

[timofonic]

This is one of the reasons by FOSS projects can't be owned by corporations, tons of bad decissions for the whole FOSS community.

I hope people open their eyes and understand projects owned by corporations must be totally ignored. Community projects and non-profit organizations like fundations are the way to go.

[Vadi]

Good news.

Unfortunately, I already gave Qt a try, and their Qt Designer is one of the worst tools for designing a gui. It just seems so... commercial-oriented - completele disregard for quality, instead built for quick development.

[RealNC]

You're better off writing code directly. :P The Designer was quite the disaster for an open source app I released because it was incompatible with older versions of Qt. Users couldn't build the app because they had a slightly older version and the Designer was generating *.ui files that were only compatible with the exact same Qt version I was using.

[anyone]

This is one of the reasons by FOSS projects can't be owned by corporations, tons of bad decissions for the whole FOSS community.

I hope people open their eyes and understand projects owned by corporations must be totally ignored. Community projects and non-profit organizations like fundations are the way to go.

I don't see what is so bad about switching to LGPL. All this changes is that those who wish to make a non-free application and don't have the money for a licence will have more choice. If you think this will increase the amount of new non-free apps in contrast to new FOSS apps, I doubt it. Non-free app devs can already use GTK+, for example.

Perhaps you will explain your view?

[smitty3268]

RE: Why?

From a Qt developer:

"The motivation for the licensing change is summed up by the mantra: "Qt Everywhere". Nokia and Qt Software are committed to removing every single blocking objection against using Qt that it feasibly can. This includes licensing quibbles. Whatever the merit of the GPL vs LGPL arguments were, this is a pragmatic decision taken to make it all a moot point and broaden acceptance of Qt."


I think there have been a lot of companies who have said they would love to use Qt instead of GTK, but they were unwilling to pay for the commercial license or to opensource their apps under the GPL. Hopefully this will increase adoption of Qt as much as the people at Nokia seem to think it will.

[remm]

Red Hat and many others had to choose GTK due to the license issue, so that third party would consider their desktop platform viable. Unfortunately, braindead KDE fanboys never understood that.

Now that issue is gone, I wonder what will happen. It's possible Gnome goes down very quickly.