[Interest] Qt Creator licensing for companies with Qt Commercial developers
Jean-Michaël Celerier
jeanmichael.celerier at gmail.com
Tue Mar 31 21:01:39 CEST 2020
Regarding 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.
Could you clarify these cases :
1/ Is "Qt under open-source license" limited to the downloads on qt.io, or
any software code related to Qt ?
1/ a. Does this also cover people doing apt-get install qtcreator on Debian
or brew install qtcreator on macOS
1/ b. Does this also cover forks of Qt ? say, company H builds a plug-in
using Copperspice for the software ordered by company F. Does company H
need to take a Qt license ?
1/ c. Does this also cover WebKit / Blink engines, which come from KHTML,
which was developed at some point in the past with open-source Qt and thus
every software using a derivative of WebKit on earth ? (electron, chrome,
microsoft edge, etc)... eg. if I, as company H, ship an electron app in the
context of the project of company F (say, the electron app is opened when a
button is pressed in the app developed by company F), do I also need to get
a Qt license ?
And, if the answer to c. is "no", how is that different from company H
"subcontracting" by developing a library with open-source Qt, putting it on
the Qt market place, and having company G download it and integrate it to
its project ?
Thanks for your answers so far,
Jean-Michaël
On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 7:32 PM Tuukka Turunen <tuukka.turunen at qt.io> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Jérôme et al,
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> Here are some examples that hopefully clarify the point about mixing
> open-source and commercial:
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> Yours,
>
>
>
> Tuukka
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *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
>
>
>
> Hi,
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> The departure between mixing LGPL and Commercial one is such a gray area,
> nobody want to venture anywhere there.
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
>
>
> *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
>
>
>
> Hi Andy,
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> Yours,
>
>
>
> Tuukka
>
>
>
> *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
>
>
>
> > "This is at the moment not listed as an allowed case..."
>
>
>
> And this again is here the Qt company is digging it's own grave.
>
>
>
> 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...
>
>
>
> Even a solo developer needs to hire a lawyer before touching anything
> Qt-related.
>
>
>
> Once you start trying to codify all the different scenarios in your
> licensing, it becomes toxic and people will avoid it
>
>
>
> ---
> Andy Maloney // https://asmaloney.com
>
> twitter ~ @asmaloney <https://twitter.com/asmaloney>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 9:36 AM Tuukka Turunen <tuukka.turunen at qt.io>
> wrote:
>
>
> 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
>
>
>
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