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

Tue Mar 31 20:34:40 CEST 2020

Den tis 31 mars 2020 kl 19:32 skrev Tuukka Turunen <tuukka.turunen at qt.io>:
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> Hi Jérôme et al,
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> This thread has long ago left the original question and become a discussion about Qt licensing in general and especially about the point of not mixing commercial Qt with open-source version of Qt.
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> 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.
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> Reason is simple: if mixing was allowed, many companies would use it to pay less for their use of Qt.
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> It is unfortunate that also real open-source projects may be affected in some cases. Majority of users are not affected in any way.
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> It is also unfortunate if licensing is felt to be so complex that it is better to use some other technology. Commercial licensing of Qt is quite flexible and it is also possible to negotiate and ask for advice in case it is unclear what is allowed and what not.
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> Here are some examples that hopefully clarify the point about mixing open-source and commercial:
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> Example 1: Company A has 10 developers creating a product. 5 of them use Qt under commercial license and 5 do not use Qt at all. This is ok.
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> Example 2: Company B has 10 developers creating a product. 5 of them use Qt under open-source license and 5 do not use Qt at all. This is ok.
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> Example 3: Company C has 10 developers creating a product. 5 of them use Qt under commercial license and 5 use Qt under open-source license. This is not allowed.
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> Example 4: Large company D is creating a product with Qt under commercial license. Part of the work is subcontracted to Company E that uses Qt under commercial license. This is ok.
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> Example 5: Large company F is creating a product with Qt under commercial license. Part of the work is subcontracted to Company G that uses Qt under commercial license. Company G subcontracts some of the work further to low-cost Company H, who uses Qt under open-source license. This is not allowed.

I'm sorry, but you cannot be serious.

My company F owns a mall and decide to do some renovating of the
bottom floor, using our own staff for the renovation. We use a suite
of power tools from company Frob Inc, where we've decided to go with
the more expensive option which includes support from Frob if they
fail. After a while, we decide we cannot finish the renovation in time
and subcontract some of the demolition work required to external
contractor G. They too use Frob tools with paid support. Some time
into the demolition, several people at G quit their jobs, and the
manager at G decide to hire some folks from H, who use happen to use
one single Frob tool (say a jackhammer), but have not gone with the
paid support option. Now my company F is infringing the contract with
Frob.

Do you see the absurdity? For me as manager at F, to be sure we're not
breaking the contract with Frob, we would have to stipulate our
contract with G not only that they themselves stick with paid-support
Frob tools, but that they in turn must stipulate the same in their
contracts with any H type subcontractors.

And you think this will encourage people to pick commercial Qt?

Elvis

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> Example 6: Company I is building two independent products with separate development teams. One development team uses Qt under commercial license to create product 1 and the other development team uses Qt under open-source license to create product 2. This is ok.
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> Hopefully I was able to clarify the topic with these examples. The Qt Company wants to provide Qt under open-source license. There is no mega corporation with deep pockets behind. Development of Qt is funded with the revenues gained from commercial licensing.
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> Yours,
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>                 Tuukka
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> From: Jérôme Godbout <godboutj at amotus.ca>
> Date: Tuesday 31. March 2020 at 17.56
> To: Tuukka Turunen <tuukka.turunen at qt.io>, Andy <asmaloney at gmail.com>
> Cc: "interest at qt-project.org" <interest at qt-project.org>
> Subject: RE: [Interest] Qt Creator licensing for companies with Qt Commercial developers
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> Hi,
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> the mix is not a corner case, it’s the reality of many people around. We are a services compagnie, and this is really a headache to understand where it should fall since we do project for client but we are a single cie. The license of Qt have is such an ambiguity and our lawyer recommend (not even sure himself where we do fall) we avoid using it as much as we can given the context we are in. When a client have commercial license, we ask them to use their infrastructure and avoid having any commercial license on premise (we cannot take any chance). If you think your licensing is clear and make it easy, it ain’t, we do more and more Xamarin, just for license reason not because we like it.  I continue Qt mostly on hobby, really like Qml and where the binding in C++ is heading. But for my work job, Qt is fading out.
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> The departure between mixing LGPL and Commercial one is such a gray area, nobody want to venture anywhere there.
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> Note: I don’t speak in the name of my cie, but my own opinion here. Just stating the fact that the Qt license is the main reason we often ditch Qt for some application.
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> From: Interest <interest-bounces at qt-project.org> On Behalf Of Tuukka Turunen
> Sent: March 31, 2020 10:33 AM
> To: Andy <asmaloney at gmail.com>
> Cc: interest at qt-project.org
> Subject: Re: [Interest] Qt Creator licensing for companies with Qt Commercial developers
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> Hi Andy,
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> You are asking to explicitly define terms like project, company, product. These are rarely possible to define outside of the generic use of the term and each individual contract. I assume you understand that it is not possible to take any stand of those in an email. We have these listed in the FAQ and contracts in as clear way as we have been able to list these.
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> I have also tried to explain these, but your tone feels rather aggressive. I do not understand what makes you say: “Even a solo developer needs to hire a lawyer before touching anything Qt-related.” For most of the situation the licensing of Qt is really simple and also very permissive. Yes, there are certain complex corner cases, like mixing of commercial on open-source versions of the Qt framework/tools. But how often do you need to mix these? Most of the Qt users are using either the commercial or the open-source version.
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> Yours,
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>                 Tuukka
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> From: Andy <asmaloney at gmail.com>
> Date: Tuesday 31. March 2020 at 16.47
> To: Tuukka Turunen <tuukka.turunen at qt.io>
> Cc: Giuseppe D'Angelo <giuseppe.dangelo at kdab.com>, "interest at qt-project.org" <interest at qt-project.org>
> Subject: Re: [Interest] Qt Creator licensing for companies with Qt Commercial developers
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> > "This is at the moment not listed as an allowed case..."
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> And this again is here the Qt company is digging it's own grave.
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> What constitutes a "product"? If a company has one team working on an open source library and another team using it in a proprietary application - what then? What if an internal tool uses some code or a library from proprietary application? What if...
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> Even a solo developer needs to hire a lawyer before touching anything Qt-related.
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> Once you start trying to codify all the different scenarios in your licensing, it becomes toxic and people will avoid it
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> ---
> Andy Maloney  //  https://asmaloney.com
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> twitter ~ @asmaloney
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> On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 9:36 AM Tuukka Turunen <tuukka.turunen at qt.io> wrote:
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> Hi,
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> 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.
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> Yours,
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>         Tuukka
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> 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:
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>     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.
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>     > See licensing FAQ question 2.7 athttps://www.qt.io/faq/  and License agreement athttps://www.qt.io/terms-conditions/
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>     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.
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>     Here's a few scenarios:
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>     1) I have a Qt commercial license. In my project using commercial Qt I
>     want to use a library developed by
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>     1a) some other team in my company;
>     1b) someone else.
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>     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":
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>     > “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
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>     Does "created with" here extend to GPL Creator?
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>     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.
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>     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
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