[Interest] Licensing

Uwe Rathmann Uwe.Rathmann at tigertal.de
Wed Oct 9 11:05:08 CEST 2019


On 10/8/19 7:13 PM, Ilya Diallo wrote:

> 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, ...

Please allow me to quote Wikipedia:

"The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a
software component released under the LGPL into their own (even
proprietary) software without being required by the terms of a strong
copyleft license to release the source code of their own components."

The motivation for not using the LGPL - at least on the desktop - is
usually, that you want to avoid its obligations, when linking
statically. That's all.

There is no inner logic behind bundling the commercial license with
support contracts and the number of developers using it - beside, that
the Qt company makes this connection.

I don't have much opinion on this topic - not my business - but I don't
agree that "fair/unfair" is a valid category in this context.

But I have a strong opinion about using FUD as sales strategy:

- intimidation paragraphs
- blacklisting projects that follow the rules of the LGPL properly
- giving wrong information ( check the video ) about the LGPL

Uwe



More information about the Interest mailing list