[Interest] Impact of QtWayland licensing on applications bundling OSS Qt?

[Mike Rochefort]

This is a question for more legal-minded folk, but it doesn't hurt to 
reach out to those who may have existing developer experience with this. 
Apologies if this isn't the right place for this line of questioning.

Looking at where the Linux desktop is headed, having some kind of 
support for the Wayland environment is a must. Fortunately, Qt does 
provide the ability to run applications in a Wayland session via the 
QtWayland QPA plugins. As some proprietary software providers use the 
OSS core Qt stack and bundle the self-built framework along with their 
applications, the GPL licensing of QtWayland is potentially a legal 
roadblock on the path to Wayland adoption.

The applications themselves would not (to my knowledge) touch QtWayland 
code, but the module's libraries would be distributed along with the 
rest of the framework and application. If the intent is to only build 
and ship QtWayland in order to provide the QPA plugins that Qt will use 
at runtime, would this have any impact on the applications' licensing 
during distribution?

Additionally, considering Wayland is becoming a core piece of the Linux 
ecosystem is there a reason why the QtWayland module doesn't follow the 
same licensing as QtBase where the other QPA plugins are provided?

Cheers,
Mike