[Interest] Licensing

[Tuukka Turunen]

“In the latter case, the rational is (I guess) to prevent a company, say, to work with 20 developers for 3 years on an OSS Qt license, then switch to commercial when it's time to ship the product and the team is reduced to a core maintenance crew. That late switch is unfair to companies that are playing by the rule, but it's probably hard to police for the Qt company.”

Yes, exactly.

Same reasoning behind the “no mixing of items developed with commercial and open-source licenses of Qt”. If that was allowed a company with 10 developers would have only 1 license to access support for all of the team’s problems and to get accelerated bug fixes – and of course to ship with.

Yours,

                Tuukka

From: Interest <interest-bounces at qt-project.org> on behalf of Ilya Diallo <ilya.diallo at gmail.com>
Date: Tuesday, 8 October 2019 at 20.16
To: Melinda Seifert <melinda.seifert at qt.io>
Cc: Uwe Rathmann <Uwe.Rathmann at tigertal.de>, "interest at qt-project.org" <interest at qt-project.org>
Subject: Re: [Interest] Licensing

It would maybe be useful to clarify what his mistake is ?
From what I understand Uwe mixes "contributing to open source project" and "using open source Qt for a closed project". In the former case, of course he's welcome to buy commercial licences for whatever project he'll be working on. In the latter case, the rational is (I guess) to prevent a company, say, to work with 20 developers for 3 years on an OSS Qt license, then switch to commercial when it's time to ship the product and the team is reduced to a core maintenance crew. That late switch is unfair to companies that are playing by the rule, but it's probably hard to police for the Qt company.

Best regards

Ilya

Le mar. 8 oct. 2019 à 15:30, Melinda Seifert <melinda.seifert at qt.io<mailto:melinda.seifert at qt.io>> a écrit :
Uwe,
You are completely mistaken!  I'm more than happy to discuss this with you. My phone number is listed below. In the meantime please view https://www.qt.io/faq/

2.13. If I have started development of a project using the open source version (LGPL), can I later purchase a commercial version of Qt and move my code under that license?
"This is not permitted without written consent from The Qt Company. If you have already started the development with an open-source version of Qt, please contact The Qt Company to resolve the issue. If you are unsure of which license or version to use when you start development, we recommend you contact The Qt Company to advise you on the best choice based on your development needs."

Best Regards,

Melinda Seifert
Regional Director of the Americas
The Qt Company
O: 617-377-7918 | M: 617-413-4479
Qt Customer Case Studies - https://resources.qt.io/customer-stories-all


On 10/8/19, 3:54 AM, "Interest on behalf of Uwe Rathmann" <interest-bounces at qt-project.org<mailto:interest-bounces at qt-project.org> on behalf of Uwe.Rathmann at tigertal.de<mailto:Uwe.Rathmann at tigertal.de>> wrote:

    On 10/8/19 1:21 AM, Melinda Seifert wrote:

    > You can use commercial if you previously used Open Source but it’s on
    > a case by case basis and you need to get approval from the Qt
    > company.

    Like you need to get approval from the Qt company when not having been
    Open Source before - it is the basic right of any seller not to sell.

    But your statement implies, that the Qt Company is blacklisting users
    because of contributing to Open Source projects. Am I already
    blacklisted because of offering code under an Open Source license ?

    How does this all fit to the Qt project, that is in parts based on
    contributions from Open Source developers. Am I invited to contribute to
    the code base, while not being allowed to buy my own contribution
    afterwards ?

    Uwe

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