[Interest] Contributor agreement rundown

[Stephen Kelly]

Stephen Kelly wrote:

> 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.

Clarification: It was DateMath functions. 

They have already been removed in Qt 5 though in commit 
65bfc35429e845cf6b76d58107360a1360a654fc in qtdeclarative, so QML probably 
is LGPL-free in Qt 5.

> 
> 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.