[Qt-interest] LGPL and static linking

[Christian Dähn]

Hi,

Robin Helgelin <lobbin at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 19:10, Thiago Macieira <thiago at kde.org> wrote:
> > QtWebkit, QtMultimedia, QtHelp and Phonon have always been LGPL. That position
> > has not changed. If your application didn't use them before these modules
> > existed (pre 4.4), then nothing would change for you. You'd only need to
> > follow the new obligations if you *started* making use of these modules.
> 
> Yes, but it cripples me as a paying customer where I'm actually paying
> you (Nokia) for something I can't use.

Exactly! Full acknowledge!

The paying customers just have to pay (raised!) fee's for now
limited support: You just have a few requests for free, if you
have too much requests, you have to pay additional fees...
...I know Trolltech since 1999 and am so frustrated how they
developed and how they care about their trusty paying customers.

As I heard of the merging with Nokia I and many other commercial
customers where very afraid that Nokia will break the Troll's
traditions and their way of work/support. And now it's already
reality :-(

But: Whilst commercial customers have to pay raised fees for
reduced support and lesser possibilities to use the toolkit
in closed source applications - the focus of Nokia seems
to be only on open source.

So dear Sales people (who didn't answered any of my eMails):

What's actually the benefit purchasing the maintenance contracts?
- Support prices are raised 10-30% after Nokia merge
- Support is now limited to 10 requests
- the response times are now multiple days (in real > 2 business days)
  (in 2006 for example I got a qualified response within a day regularly,
   this year my last request was > 2 business days)
- I needed to call a Qt/Nokia lawyer to get the service contracts
  ...we (my company) didn't got any contracts - only the new Nokia
  page mentions the new contract details
- the LGPL licenses forbids usage of QtHelp & Co. in static apps

Just my two cents.

ciao,
Chris