
Originally Posted by
RealNC
Owning the copyright means owning the rights to your work, meaning owning an *exclusive* right to relicense your code. Normally, only he copyright owner has that right. The CLA allows Digia to relicense your code which is normally only possible by the copyright owner.
So still having the copyright to your code doesn't mean much since you can't control what they do with it. They can do anything they wish with it. The effect is the same as assigning them the copyright.
Note how this is in tandem with the BSD license. But Digia doesn't offer Qt under the BSD. They offer it under the LGPL. Of course that's because Digia doesn't want to give contributors the same rights contributors give to Digia. That would be bad for business. It's pretty much an abuse of the LGPL. But only from a contributor's point of view. From the user's perspective, you're dealing with LGPL code. You can modify it and redistribute it as you see fit. The only thing you can't do is having your code accepted upstream. So if you have large modifications, you would need to fork Qt and maintain those modifications there yourself and keep everything LGPL.