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I was the lead on a cross-platform desktop application developed using Qt. I do not find the author of this article's segregation quite accurate. He seems to c
by BuckyBeaver 4y ago
I was the lead on a cross-platform desktop application developed using Qt. I do not find the author of this article's segregation quite accurate.
He seems to call all commercial Qt usage "Qt for device creation." That's slightly backward. Qt's "device creation" category is for embedded software. All use of Qt for embedded applications is "Qt for device creation" and requires a commercial license. But not all commercial Qt usage is for device creation.
There is also commercial Qt work for desktop and mobile apps. If you want to sell software made with Qt, that too requires a commercial license. When you're negotiating a license purchase with Qt reps, they will try to categorize your work as "device creation" if they can. They did this with us, simply because we were building an application to control other devices. But I disabused them of this notion, because the devices ran no Qt runtime or any software developed with Qt. They did not pursue the matter further, and we bought a couple of commercial licenses.
This article does reveal the ridiculous nature of Qt licensing, however. It would be interesting to know how many times the Qt Company has pursued action against license violations, and what the nature of said violations was. I'm not sure their reps understand the licensing.
Also, Qt's licensing fees for embedded products are laughably high. The article cites something like $8 per device, which is even higher than what we were quoted. But any price measured in whole dollars per unit is ridiculous, and we told them as much. I can only speak for my company, but they will never be a candidate with rates like that.
- rhn_mk1 4y ago> If you want to sell software made with Qt, that too requires a commercial license. The GPL allows commercial use including sales, BTW.
- saidinesh5 4y agoI think he just means closed source mobile apps. For desktop applications, you can just dynamically link Qt and still sell your closed source applications. For Mobile apps, LGPLv3 is a little tricky. You need to allow the users to replace the bundled Qt libs with their own, and on iOS that is a pain iirc. It is do-able but a lot of companies just buy Qt commercial license instead.
- BuckyBeaver 4y agoYes, when someone says "commercial app" or "sell an app" I assume closed-source and expect others to do the same.
- rhn_mk1 4y agoWe could do away with that assumption. It's not descriptive of the reality, as plenty of commercial stuff isn't closed, and neither is plenty of sold stuff. As a prescriptive position, that's not the future I want.
- BuckyBeaver 4y agoWhat's the difference between "commercial" and "sold," and what are some examples of either one for which full source is available?
- rhn_mk1 4y agoTBH I have no idea. Commercial stuff can be handed out for free, I guess? Look at Krita, OpenSUSE, RHEL, the software on the Librem 5, PinePhone, and Turris routers. Those are just from the top of my head.
- JetSpiegel 4y agoHow are any of those programs commercial? You don't pay for the software itself. Krita is donations, SUSE and RHEL is support, the others are hardware.
- jcelerier 4y agoAnd still you can make closed source apps that link against LGPLv3 Qt (or LGPLv3 anything as long as your end user has a way to patch the LGPLv3 parts) and sell them without issues?
- BuckyBeaver 4y ago