[Interest] Qt Creator licensing for companies with Qt Commercial developers

[Tuukka Turunen]

Hi,

As I have said earlier in this thread it can feel odd that the restriction of mixing extends also to the Qt tools, even in case framework libraries are not used.

I want to again emphasize that this is something that does not affect open-source use of Qt – as long as it is not done in conjunction with a commercially licensed Qt.

We have been considering of separately licensing some of the tools, but no decisions done yet.

Yours,

                Tuukka

From: tomek <osmial.tomek at gmail.com>
Date: Wednesday 1. April 2020 at 13.28
To: Tuukka Turunen <tuukka.turunen at qt.io>
Cc: Krzysztof Kawa <krzysiek.kawa at gmail.com>, "interest at qt-project.org" <interest at qt-project.org>
Subject: Re: [Interest] Qt Creator licensing for companies with Qt Commercial developers

Hi Tuukka,

so if the company's product is say modern car's head unit which is built from many, many blocks and to build one of those (UI) Qt with commercial license was used then hundreds or thousands of developers in the same company or many subcontractor companies developers are forbidden to use Qt Creator based on GPL license as their IDE of choice to C/C++ code development within that product (but for other modules not relying on Qt at all, physically stored in different repos/subrepos)? From the company/project management perspective there will be most probably many projects (per module/block) but in the end all will be bundled into one package which will land on the blackbox so according to your explanation it will be license violation, right?

Thanks,
Tomasz/

śr., 1 kwi 2020 o 07:24 Tuukka Turunen <tuukka.turunen at qt.io<mailto:tuukka.turunen at qt.io>> napisał(a):
Hi,

To me your example does not sound problematic assuming that your application is like a typical app - a clearly different thing than the store that sells apps (the store sells a lot of different apps and your is in no way relevant for operating the store etc).

Also, for any particular real case at hand, you can ask if something is allowed for you or not.

Yours,

        Tuukka


On 31.3.2020, 23.15, "Interest on behalf of Krzysztof Kawa" <interest-bounces at qt-project.org<mailto:interest-bounces at qt-project.org> on behalf of krzysiek.kawa at gmail.com<mailto:krzysiek.kawa at gmail.com>> wrote:

    > The key point is: The Qt Company, just like Trolltech initially and other companies in between, does not want mixing open-source Qt and commercial Qt.
    > Reason is simple: if mixing was allowed, many companies would use it to pay less for their use of Qt.
    > It is unfortunate that also real open-source projects may be affected in some cases. Majority of users are not affected in any way.

    This got me thinking about quite a simple case that doesn't seem so
    simple now: Lets say I make a game using open-source licensed Qt, or
    even just open-source licensed Qt Creator. After few years of
    development I decide to publish the game. It just so happens that my
    publisher has a storefront app using commercial Qt or even just
    written in Qt Creator under commercial license. To put my app in their
    store there's usually some API, config file or whatever that
    technically makes it mixing the two, even if not through Qt based
    interface. Does that mean I can't publish my app in that store? If
    that's the case then this pretty much makes Qt dead for any sort of
    game development because there's no possible way to know which
    publishers are gonna use what tech and under what license by the time
    you ship. Same thing goes for any app distributed through external
    stores I guess and I know at least few that use Qt.
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