Some Qt Contributors Uneasy About The Growing Commercial Focus Of The Qt Company

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Some Qt Contributors Uneasy About The Growing Commercial Focus Of The Qt Company

For the past week has been a somewhat active mailing list thread about the Qt Project being misrepresented on The Qt Company's qt.io web-site...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Qtio-Open-Source-Concerns

[Goddard]

Qt is my favorite tool. I hope they continue to foster a good relationship.

[zanny]

Personally I am a huge fan of having a (A)GPLv3 version and commercial licensing. If anything, the LGPL version of Qt is the most threatening part about it to the longevity of the Qt company since 3rd parties can take Qt verbatim, make proprietary software with it, and as long as they do not modify Qt itself are getting an extremely powerful toolkit for free.

I can understand why you would not want to prominently showcase the availability of such a version of your product. But due to the CLA, the Qt company does not really have to. It doesn't violate the KDE agreement either by dropping the LGPL.

It is the same thing with Gitlab. They really should have made the CE AGPL, so that companies wanting to keep changes local and closed would need to buy a license, whereas their current MIT licensing lets third party commercial entities add whatever they want to the CE while keeping it closed source, while not giving Gitlab a cent.

Those kinds of situations are what leads to the situation Qt is now trying to mitigate - they made their QML Charts and compiler enterprise only, and are now making them GPL, but there has always been a huge outcry about useful features in both camps - for example, Gitlabs LDAP support - being proprietary-only features, but these businesses do so because if they have no value add in the commercial product they lose tons of sales to the free version, since they made the mistake of permissively licensing it. Strong copyleft is great for maintaining user freedoms and incentivizing companies to pay you for alternative licenses - if they don't want to provide freedom - they can pay for it.

[Zoll]

Qt is a company and needs to make money. Just be thankful this great tool is available for everyone under Open Source licenses. If someone needs to dig a bit deeper to find the open source download, so what? That never bothered me.

[Zoll]

If anything, the LGPL version of Qt is the most threatening part about it to the longevity of the Qt company since 3rd parties can take Qt verbatim, make proprietary software with it, and as long as they do not modify Qt itself are getting an extremely powerful toolkit for free.

Folks were whining for over a decade that Qt is not commercial-friendly because it was not LGPL and now that it is, it became threatening? IMO, LGPL helped to propel Qt further into the commercial world

[doom_Oo7]

There is also a lot of FUD regarding LGPL being spread in forums :

https://www.reddit.com/comments/338pwq

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/40rmh4/qt_is_guaranteed_to_stay_free_and_open_legal/

https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/3yij5v/gammaray_interactive_graphical_qt_c_qml_debugger/

[darkbasic]

Time to fork?

[quaz0r]

you mean like http://www.copperspice.com/

[pracedru]

The LGPL license is what made it possible for us to use Qt at my company.
People around here are still not comfortable with open source, but Qt has certainly helped.

[ssokolow]

Personally I am a huge fan of having a (A)GPLv3 version and commercial licensing. If anything, the LGPL version of Qt is the most threatening part about it to the longevity of the Qt company since 3rd parties can take Qt verbatim, make proprietary software with it, and as long as they do not modify Qt itself are getting an extremely powerful toolkit for free.

From what I remember, there was an explicit concern about companies like VMWare preferring GTK+ over Qt due to it offering an LGPL license while Qt didn't. Given that Ubuntu and Fedora both favour GTK+-based desktops and there tend to be more and better GTK+ language bindings than Qt bindings due to the ease of wrapping the C ABI via the GObject Introspection system, killing off the LGPL option would only hurt Qt more.

(Something I really don't want, since I don't like the direction the GTK+ 3.x ecosystem seems to be going as far as well-maintained themes and UI design guidelines go)