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

Vyacheslav Lanovets sol at lanovets.ru
Sun Apr 5 18:52:10 CEST 2020


Hi Tuukka,

Thanks for the update.

The company has hundreds of developers in many countries. One or two
teams in one country started a project with Qt Autonomous without
agreeing across a company.
A few other teams in other countries will use Qt Commercial for
iPhone. To avoid legal issues if we ever want to reuse each other code
we had to pay Autonomous license ($$$$$) for all teams, which did hit
mobile project costs.

Qt Creator IDE will be banned across whole company for anyone else,
there are alternative IDEs.
Qt Creator is a nice IDE by itself, so it makes sense to start selling
it separately.

On Thu, Apr 2, 2020 at 8:24 AM Tuukka Turunen <tuukka.turunen at qt.io> wrote:
>
> Hi Matthew,
>
> Unless you are in the situation described by the person who originated this email thread, I am rather sure you can continue using the GPL version of Creator.
>
> The whole point of this email thread was situations where the same development project team (creating the same product) would like to mix commercially and open-source licensed Qt frameworks or tools. This is not allowed, but also not the most common case. Typically either commercial or open-source version of Qt is used, which is the way indented.
>
> Yours,
>
>         Tuukka
>
> On 1.4.2020, 22.16, "Matthew Woehlke" <mwoehlke.floss at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>     On 27/03/2020 08.55, Tuukka Turunen wrote:
>     > Correct. All users need to have commercial license. It is not allowed for part of the team to use commercial and part use open-source. Even though Qt Creator is great, it can feel odd to pay for full Qt license and only use the Creator IDE.
>     >
>     > We have been thinking about selling Qt Creator separately, but so far no decisions made on this.
>
>     Wait, *WHAT?!* AFAIK, GPL imposes no restrictions on material created
>     *using* GPL'd software (with possible exceptions if such use results in
>     materials that incorporate parts of the software used, e.g. bison/flex).
>
>     That said, I wouldn't know what sorts of crazy provisions the Qt
>     commercial licensing may contain... IMHO though requiring licensees to
>     not use a particular IDE is pretty asinine.
>
>     > On 25.3.2020, 21.09, "Interest on behalf of Vyacheslav Lanovets" <interest-bounces at qt-project.org on behalf of sol at lanovets.ru> wrote:
>     >
>     >     Hi,
>     >
>     >     Situation.
>     >
>     >     A company has a few developers with Qt Commercial subscription who
>     >     write applications in Qt for iOS.
>     >     There are many other developers, who work on other projects and don't
>     >     use Qt libraries.
>     >     They talk to each other and sometimes even work on the same code.
>     >
>     >     Is it still possible for the developers who don't use Qt libraries in
>     >     any way, use Qt Creator IDE for editing and debugging?
>     >     To be on the safe side, company plans to prohibit usage of Qt Creator
>     >     IDE for all employees.
>     >     I reckon this is a popular solution.
>     >     If I understand correctly, Qt even sells a special option to ban all
>     >     company IP addresses for open-source installer.
>     >
>     >     But is it really so?
>     >
>     >     Regards,
>     >     Vyacheslav
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>     >
>
>
>     --
>     Matthew
>
>


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