[Interest] Qt free software policy

Tuukka Turunen tuukka.turunen at qt.io
Fri Aug 16 08:40:59 CEST 2019


“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.”

Sorry for that. I also should have used words “did not mean” not “did not say” in my reply.

Emails as a medium is tricky, easy to misunderstand the tone.

I do agree that we should clarify this, especially the GPLv2 and GPLv3 part is not clearly explained at qt.io websites. The approach is to use the v3 of both LGPL and GPL for new things, but to keep GPLv2 option for Essentials and those Add-ons that existed in December 2015, see clause 4.4 and 4.6 in  https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/Software_License_Agreement_2015.pdf

Yours,

                Tuukka



From: Interest <interest-bounces at qt-project.org> on behalf of Benjamin TERRIER <b.terrier at gmail.com>
Date: Thursday, 15 August 2019 at 12.18
To: qt qt <interest at qt-project.org>
Subject: Re: [Interest] Qt free software policy



Le jeu. 15 août 2019 à 09:18, Vadim Peretokin <vperetokin at gmail.com<mailto: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<mailto: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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/interest/attachments/20190816/c1884c5a/attachment.html>


More information about the Interest mailing list