[Interest] QML vs Electron

[Benjamin TERRIER]

Hello everyone,

May I raise the subject of licensing when it comes to comparing QML vs
Electron popularity.

Electron and other javascript technologies (node, jquery, etc.) are
licensed under permissive (no copyleft) open source licenses like MIT.

Regarding Qt, even the most permissive license (LGPLv3) comes with a
lot of constraints.
Also having 3 license options (GPL, LGPL and commercial) can be a bit confusing.

We could also talk about the "lies" of The Qt Company about the
licensing options.
A few examples from the current https://www.qt.io/download:

> Open source usage of Qt is free as in “free speech”. As a Free Software user you contribute or “pay” to our open source project by making your code available to others – ensuring the end-users’ rights.

This would clearly make everyone think that if they use Qt under LGPL
they cannot develop a closed source software.

Also in the same page qmake, Qt Creator and Qt Designer are listed as
"limited to GPL only".
This make people think they cannot use any Qt tools if they use Qt
under LGPL license.

I have also heard The Qt Company employees, while giving a speech
about "choosing the right" license, say that
the Open Source license is for people who want to share their code...

I do understand that The Qt Company is doing most of the work on Qt
and they need money, so they need to sell licenses.
But I do not understand this urge to be dishonest. I do feel that they
want to scare new developers and force them to buy a license.
I also have the feeling, that since all Qt websites are under qt.io,
it is harder and harder to find clear information about Qt Open Source
nature.

How can we expect new developers to go for Qt and QML, when they have
to face (L)GPL vs MIT license issues ?
If they don't dig, they will meet all the communication of The Qt
Company explaining that the NEED to buy a license.
If they dig deeper, they will start to find mainly "ask your lawyer"
type of answers.
And so they will not buy a license, they will not ask their lawyer.
They will save thousands of euros on the license price or lawyer fees,
they will
save weeks of waiting for the lawyer response. They will just go with
the MIT license option and use Electron, NodeJS and other JS toys.

Regards,

Benjamin

PS: I am not saying that The Qt Company is malicious. The proof is
that on other parts of the qt.io one can find clear and unbiased info
about LGPL/GPL,
but in general the info seem a bit too much biased toward selling
commercial licenses.