[Qt-interest] LGPL and static linking

[Oliver.Knoll at comit.ch]

Christian Dähn wrote on Tuesday, December 01, 2009 5:43 PM:

> > ...
> Summing up the Qt toolkit was changed in a way where longterm
> commercial customers get problems with open source licenses and
> nobody took care of that.  
> 
> Such was completely incredible in the past - where Qt was developed
> by Trolltech - not by Nokia. 

I have not followed this thread in every detail, nor did I use QWebkit, but in order to defend Qt Software's position a bit: to my understanding QWebkit is a "module" - you are free to link against it or not (without touching the "native" functionality of QtCore, QtGui etc.).

So Qt Software took a popular library which happens to have licenses which (obviously) do not go well with all commercial / linking scenarios, and they provided a nice integration into th "Qt world" (API).

But can you blame them for the license restrictions (done by others!) which might occur? Yes, off course Qt Software asks money from comercial customers, such as you, but nowadays you pay them for support, not the actual Qt library as such (to my understanding you can also use the LGPed Qt version for commercial software, without paying a dime, right?).

So when it comes to using QWebkit, it is more a "take it or leave it" situation: "Use the Qt integration of a *3rd party* component, and bite into the LGPL apple, or simply don't use it!"

The other scenario is where Qt Software would re-implement a "webkit" on their own, but off course this is totally out of scope of a toolkit, such as Qt, which in my opinion should really just provide the "basic building blocks" of an application - I don't consider an entire web browser a "basic building block" for a typical desktop application.

Yes, it is nice that nowadays you have this (optional!) possibilty to embed a webbrowser into your app - but obviously with the given license restrictions (uh, I repeat myself ;).

When it comes to QtScript, I don't know nothing about that - but as someone has pointed out, you can still license the "original" implementation which is "Qt Software" only.


Cheers, Oliver
-- 
Oliver Knoll
Dipl. Informatik-Ing. ETH
COMIT AG - ++41 79 520 95 22