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That sounds concerning, I would really like to know more about what that really means. I briefly started investigating the changes for Qt 5.7 before I started

by radix07 10y ago

That sounds concerning, I would really like to know more about what that really means. I briefly started investigating the changes for Qt 5.7 before I started having flashbacks of trying to figure out all this LGPL stuff again. Does not seem to be any less confusing...

joezydeco 10y ago
My team didn't take the proposal, but from what I gathered during some fact-finding the 5.7 terms changed what you need to distribute to customers regarding the Qt libraries. Before, you had to maintain a Qt source repository that matched distribution. People could build and link in Qt as they pleased, either vanilla from that repo or modified as they liked. With 5.7 and the new LGPL, it seemed that you also have to provide the entire toolchain needed to build the source and link it into the final application. Which means you also need to provide the kernel headers and etc that match up. I could be totally wrong. But I'm guessing 5.7 required too much other stuff be made public and the customer wasn't pleased with that. Can't say I disagree.
- slavik81 10y ago
  It's the same anti-tvoization stuff as GPL3. Companies were giving out the source code, but used locked down hardware or proprietary toolchains so the source code was useless. What LGPL3 specifies over LGPL2 is that the source code needs to actually be usable. The spirit of that rule rather makes sense to me. Of course, part of the reason why The Qt Company likes LGPL3 is that other companies are going to look at the requirements to use and distribute open toolchains for their supported platforms and just buy a commercial license instead.
  - joezydeco 10y ago
    The funny thing is that the Yocto project has kind of eliminated a lot of the hurdles. You could technically branch a .bb recipe for your kernel and boardset and everything else would build on its own, including the SDK with toolchain wrapped in. Qt seems to be almost caught up with getting qt5 in the meta directories and having everything in place.

by radix07 10y ago

joezydeco 10y ago

My team didn't take the proposal, but from what I gathered during some fact-finding the 5.7 terms changed what you need to distribute to customers regarding the Qt libraries. Before, you had to maintain a Qt source repository that matched distribution. People could build and link in Qt as they pleased, either vanilla from that repo or modified as they liked. With 5.7 and the new LGPL, it seemed that you also have to provide the entire toolchain needed to build the source and link it into the final application. Which means you also need to provide the kernel headers and etc that match up. I could be totally wrong. But I'm guessing 5.7 required too much other stuff be made public and the customer wasn't pleased with that. Can't say I disagree.

slavik81 10y ago
It's the same anti-tvoization stuff as GPL3. Companies were giving out the source code, but used locked down hardware or proprietary toolchains so the source code was useless. What LGPL3 specifies over LGPL2 is that the source code needs to actually be usable. The spirit of that rule rather makes sense to me. Of course, part of the reason why The Qt Company likes LGPL3 is that other companies are going to look at the requirements to use and distribute open toolchains for their supported platforms and just buy a commercial license instead.
- joezydeco 10y ago
  The funny thing is that the Yocto project has kind of eliminated a lot of the hurdles. You could technically branch a .bb recipe for your kernel and boardset and everything else would build on its own, including the SDK with toolchain wrapped in. Qt seems to be almost caught up with getting qt5 in the meta directories and having everything in place.