3 ms·

>The most annoying example of this is when companies open-source their works under a copyleft license in an obvious attempt to get free labor from the community

>The most annoying example of this is when companies open-source their works under a copyleft license in an obvious attempt to get free labor from the community while reserving the ability to actually profit from that work for themselves. Similar to this, Qt has a LGPL license option, but when using it for a proprietary product, they really push you to buy their commercial license, and have basically no info on how to actually do LGPL compliance in the specific case of Qt's libs. I get that it's not their responsibility to make it easy for me to use an open source lib in a closed source product, but it just feels like they're using LGPL compliance as a threat if you don't pay their license.

detaro 7y ago
Their messaging on that can be a bit (probably intentionally) unclear sometimes (and from what I hear they have pushy salespeople), but many companies use it successfully under LGPL terms, and for typical desktop apps the compliance effort isn't that large. (embedded devices etc are a different problem, I suspect that's where they make most of their licensing money) They also are providing a lot of value to the open-source communities building on Qt, so I don't think they are a great example for what GP mentioned.