[Interest] Mixing Commercial and Open Source license for, different projects

[Roland Hughes]

That would be the FUD

On 3/16/21 6:00 AM, James Maxwell wrote:
> I am afraid of the following: "(ii) use Licensed Software for creation of
> any software created with or incorporating Open Source Qt"
> what does licensed software mean? If I have Qt commercial, do I always use
> Qt under commercial license and thus cannot create any software using open
> source qt?

Been hashed out on here many times. __Never__ fully resolved.

At one point the licensing was worded in such a way that if you were 
using Qt commercial you could not use Wireshark, Doxygen, or any of the 
OpenSource projects built with Qt. Visit the archive page: 
https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/interest/ pull down the zipped 
files for the past 18 months or so and unzip them into a directory tree. 
Use Sublime Text 3, Emacs, or just plain grep to search for wireshark, 
doxygen, and commercial in different searches. That should identify all 
of the message threads.

There was no real resolution.

At one point the wording was so broad and vague that if anyone anywhere 
at Intel had a commercial license, Thiago couldn't work on OpenSource 
Qt. You will find that discussion in the archive as well.

Many of the companies I'm in contact with have either begun or completed 
the abandonment of Qt.

For now my policy has been:

If a client wants me to use commercial Qt, it is their license on their 
machine. Period.

The half dozen machines in my office have only the OpenSource stuff.

If you feel compelled to straddle the fence, then go onto eBay (or where 
ever) and get yourself a ~$300 off-lease computer for your OpenSource 
development and a KVM switch so you can use your same monitors and 
toggle between two machines.

Right now that is the only way I have found to be "sure."

Study up on the alternatives because an industry wide migration appears 
to be happening. One of the best known manufacturers of high end 
video/audio products for concert halls, movie making, theaters, all the 
way down to conference rooms and your own home theater dumped Qt during 
the pandemic. As entrenched as Qt was there I didn't think it was 
physically possible. They did it in under a year. That was the solution 
they were forced into.

FUD + death-of-perpetual-license = mass-company-exit

-- 
Roland Hughes, President
Logikal Solutions
(630)-205-1593

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