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

[Tuukka Turunen]

Hi,

The point of the "Prohibited combination" is to prevent a company or a chain of companies (like in a typical subcontracting scenario) from making part of the product with non-paid Qt and part with paid. Qt being as defined in the commercial license agreement, i.e. including tools and framework. This was what the person initiating this mail thread asked about. I do agree that it gets complex when one starts including items created by an independent third party. This is at the moment not listed as an allowed case, even though it is not something we specifically aimed to prevent.

Yours,

	Tuukka

On 31.3.2020, 15.03, "Interest on behalf of Giuseppe D'Angelo via Interest" <interest-bounces at qt-project.org on behalf of interest at qt-project.org> wrote:

    On 3/31/20 1:22 PM, Tuukka Turunen wrote:
    > For completely independent projects/products this is fine. Note that these really should not be same or in practice the same - or in any way depending, relating, using etc each other as defined in the license agreement.
    > 
    > See licensing FAQ question 2.7 athttps://www.qt.io/faq/  and License agreement athttps://www.qt.io/terms-conditions/  
    
    It is still unclear if the usage of Qt _Creator_ for developing some 
    code would cause such code to fall under the restrictions of commercial 
    licensing.
    
    
    Here's a few scenarios:
    
    1) I have a Qt commercial license. In my project using commercial Qt I 
    want to use a library developed by
    
    1a) some other team in my company;
    1b) someone else.
    
    This other library is under a liberal license; does NOT use Qt itself in 
    any way; but has been developed using Qt Creator (GPL). Can I use it in 
    my product under the commercial license? Or would it fall under the 
    "Prohibited Combination":
    
    > “Prohibited Combination” shall mean any means to (i) use, combine, incorporate, link or integrate Licensed Software with any software created with or incorporating Open Source Qt, (ii) use Licensed Software for creation of any software created with or incorporating Open Source Qt
    
    Does "created with" here extend to GPL Creator?
    
    
    
    2) Same as 1, but this time with the library using Qt (as in: using 
    headers, linking against it). Example: a Qt-based library coming from 
    KDE Frameworks, developed using Creator.
    
    
    Thanks,
    -- 
    Giuseppe D'Angelo | giuseppe.dangelo at kdab.com | Senior Software Engineer
    KDAB (France) S.A.S., a KDAB Group company
    Tel. France +33 (0)4 90 84 08 53, http://www.kdab.com
    KDAB - The Qt, C++ and OpenGL Experts