[Interest] Contributor agreement rundown

[Stephen Kelly]

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.

Keep in mind that with Qt4 at least, you can't use QtScript, QML, or WebKit 
with the Qt commercial license. You use it with the LGPL (and its 
obligations) or not at all.

With Qt 5 the situation with QML is almost different. It's based on the BSD 
licensed v8 rather than the LGPL JSC, but they actually copied some JSC code 
into the QtQml module, so that one is still LGPL in Qt 5 (some math stuff). 
I don't know how easy that would be to re-write.

So, currently, if you want to use QtQuick/QML (and according to the 
marketting, you do.), you can't buy your way out of the LGPL compliance 
requirements.

You also have to figure out what those requirements are by the way, which is 
more than just whether your code must be Free or can be proprietary.

Thanks,

Steve.