[Development] Distributing 3rd party closed source libs

[Chris Gilbert]

Greetings,

We use both QT5 and the Autodesk FBX loader in our application - and we 
would strongly prefer Qt to NOT link it in.

There is a need quite often for us to update the Autodesk FBX SDK 
asymmetrically to QT, and it would be preferable QT doesn't use it in 
order to avoid potential conflicts.

Also, I believe there is a provision in the Autodesk FBX library which 
forbids inclusion in free/open source software.
(Anti-blender provision)

As a result, I believe Blender and some other applications (UE4) have 
done their own implementation, perhaps QT could borrow from that?

Thanks,
Chris Gilbert
Knald Technologies, LLC

On 10/30/2016 10:11 AM, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> On domingo, 30 de outubro de 2016 09:03:59 PDT Sean Harmer wrote:
>> I guess this is similar to the database driver plugins.
> Right.
>
> We ship the compiled plugins for both MySQL and PostgreSQL, but not their
> libraries, so the plugins can't be loaded unless the user installs the
> required client libraries (and in the case of MySQL, since they change the
> soname often, it's a difficult proposal).
>
> We do not ship compiled plugins for the proprietary databases, like OCI,
> Interbase and TDS. People who want one of those can download the sources and
> compile themselves. That's just the plugin, no need to recompile all of Qt.
>
> With my OSS hat on, I would say we shouldn't ship even a non-working binary.
> People who want it should download the source for the module and compile
> themselves. It is, after all, just a qmake && make.
>