[Development] Change in open-source licensing of Qt Wayland Compositor, Qt Application Manager and Qt PDF

Thiago Macieira thiago.macieira at intel.com
Fri Oct 11 03:19:40 CEST 2019


On Thursday, 10 October 2019 18:06:39 PDT Kevin Kofler wrote:
> I wrote:
> > Tuukka Turunen wrote:
> >> Qt PDF is a new module, which has not been released earlier despite the
> >> pre-release code being available. Changing the license to GPLv3 will
> >> allow The Qt Company to support the module going forward.
> > 
> > But this license change makes the module effectively useless for the
> > community because we already have a GPLv3-licensed implementation,
> > Poppler-Qt. The more liberal license was the only added value of PDFium.
> 
> PS: In addition, Qt PDF is de facto not a new module, but was added to the
> existing LGPL-licensed QtWebEngine module (because it uses the PDFium from
> QtWebEngine), so you will be shipping one tarball with differently licensed
> parts. This will be really confusing!

Separating would be nice to avoid that confusion. Ditto for the Wayland 
Compositor API from the rest of the Wayland Client and QPA plugin.

As for the usefulness of a GPLv3 module when there's another GPL equivalent, I 
don't see a problem. From an Open Source point of view, they're both open 
source and there's no cannibalisation. 

>From a non-open point of view, that's not my place to comment. I firmly 
believe in "why you should licence your next library GPL".

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel System Software Products





More information about the Development mailing list