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

Krzysztof Kawa krzysiek.kawa at gmail.com
Tue Mar 31 22:12:16 CEST 2020


> 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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