[Interest] Contributor agreement rundown

[Nikos Chantziaras]

Then I'd say Qt was not suitable for "open governance" and "open 
development".  Or not ready for it.

It's a funny situation right now.  I can use Qt like an open project, 
but am not allowed to contribute to it in an open manner.  In a sense, 
you must contribute more than you get.  That is unfair.


On 19/04/12 00:10, BRM wrote:
> As pointed out, the main reason Qt Commercial customers buys the commercial license is to not to have to worry about some of the LGPL requirements - namely the ability to static link.
> Where I presently work has a commercial license. We static link a lot of things. Could we dynamically link? Probably.
> We don't modify Qt itself (though we could); but we primarily don't want to have to worry about the LGPL requirements either (e.g. providing object files that can be relinked, etc.) - the company is too small to try to keep track of all of that, nor are our customers really interested in it.
>
> So there are very big concerns that the Qt Commercial License alleviates.
>
> Ben
>
>
>> ________________________________
>> From: Nikos Chantziaras<realnc at gmail.com>
>> To: interest at qt-project.org
>> Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2012 4:05 PM
>> Subject: Re: [Interest] Contributor agreement rundown
>>
>> Again, that's not my issue.  LGPL allows commercial exploitation of the
>> code.  The issue is taking open code and closing it, not allowing me
>> anymore to see how it was modified.  Being commercial has nothing to do
>> with this.
>>
>>
>> On 18/04/12 22:10, Jason H wrote:
>>> Really It's a question of comparative greed. If you don't want your
>>> source in the commercial arena, where people can make money off of you,
>>> well what's the value of that as compared to the value of the code that
>>> you get for free, as well as the value you get by those commercial
>>> interests testing the code for you.
>>>
>>> Really the commercial interests (and this is a generalization) use the
>>> commercial license to buy support. Their main concern is in having Qt
>>> work, while not divulging their "competitive advantages" which has
>>> nothing to do with the Qt toolkit (unless you count Qt as a whole). I've
>>> worked at several (4) companies that used Qt and some commercially
>>> licensed Qt (3), and it wasn't about withholding patches or profiting
>>> from your code. In all cases it was getting our existing code to work
>>> with a GUI, and not having to publish our source. (Now moot due to LGPL)
>>>
>>> Give some, get a lot.
>>>
>>>
>>> *From:* Girish Ramakrishnan<girish at forwardbias.in>
>>> *To:* Bo Thorsen<bo at fioniasoftware.dk>
>>> *Cc:* interest at qt-project.org
>>> *Sent:* Wednesday, April 18, 2012 2:46 PM
>>> *Subject:* Re: [Interest] Contributor agreement rundown
>>>
>>> On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 2:01 AM, Bo Thorsen<bo at fioniasoftware.dk
>>> <mailto:bo at fioniasoftware.dk>>  wrote:
>>>    >  Den 18-04-2012 10:33, John Layt skrev:
>>>    >>  It is a trade-off, but not entirely one-way. They get to sell your
>>> code, but
>>>    >>  the money raised goes towards supporting Qt.
>>>    >
>>>    >  Actually, I see this more as a "yes, you can buy commercial support". It
>>>    >  closes one of the objections my customers have. Of course, I usually
>>>    >  convince them that I'm all the support they need :) But it is a question
>>>    >  I've heard so often with OSS software, and it's one of the things
>>>    >  non-OSS people are concerned about.
>>>    >
>>>    >  It doesn't look like Digia is using this to fund a lot of new Qt
>>>    >  development, but if they use it to support older Qt versions, this is a
>>>    >  great thing as well (assuming those patches go to the OSS Qt). People
>>>    >  paid on OSS projects should do the boring parts :)
>>>
>>> A quick update from qt-project: Digia may not be contributing a lot to
>>> new development (yet) but they have been contributing quite a bit (a
>>> quick grep shows ~1500 patches with them as author) to Qt4 and they
>>> have been doing a great job so far.
>>>