[Interest] Qt free software policy

[Benjamin TERRIER]

Le jeu. 15 août 2019 à 09:18, Vadim Peretokin <vperetokin at gmail.com> a
écrit :

> Still, it reads like the Instagram influencer argument: "Give me free
> stuff and I'll get you exposure.", and we all know how silly that sounds
> like.
>

That is a bit insulting toward Qt contributors.
And comparing free software projects (including Qt) with Instagram's "Give
me free stuff and I'll get you exposure" is inappropriate.

If you look at the stats of Qt Base a large percentage of the commits (~40%
I'd say) are made by people external to The Qt Company.
You can have a look on Thiago's blog:
https://macieira.org/~thiago/qt-stats/current/qtbase.employer.relative.png
(BTW Thiago, if you read this, the SSL certificate is invalid and some
charts are broken)

My point is that The Qt Company is not providing free stuff merely for
exposure. It also gets many other things including developers
committing code for free, code that The Qt Company is then able to sell
under its commercial license.

Also I never asked for anything free here. I am asking if "GPLv3 only" is
and will be the standard licensing scheme for new modules
made by The Qt Company. I feel that it needs to be made clear, at least so
that if an LGPL user need something he knows
that he should not expect to have it in a future version of Qt, but should
rather contribute it himself ensuring that it will be available under LGPL.
I have also expressed my concerns that the lack of support for GPLv2 can be
an issue for some projects.
I would also like that some modules, *if they are not good sale arguments*,
could be licensed under LGPL as if they do not help
The Qt Company sales, they could at least contribute to growing the
community.


>
> On Thu, Aug 15, 2019 at 6:17 AM Tuukka Turunen <tuukka.turunen at qt.io>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> “This is wrong to say that the only alternative to Commercial + GPLv3 is
>> Commercial only.”
>>
>>
>>
>> I did not say the _*only*_ alternative. Some new things are LGPL exactly
>> to grow the user base. Qt for Python being one of such.
>>
>>
>>
>
Well you said "Alternative for using GPLv3 and commercial would be to only
offer these add-ons separately under a commercial license".
You did not say _*only alternative*_ explicitly, but it does sound, at
least to me, like it is implicitly here.

+1 for Qt for Python.


BR

Benjamin
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