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by Rochus 2389 days ago
LGPL was decided by Nokia who bought the IP from Trolltech for ~150 Mio $ and also came up for the development costs up to Qt 5.1. Digia and The Qt Company "bought" the IP for about 5 Mio $ from Nokia and now earn money with commercial licenses of a library where the most important development steps were already done before. According to the commit logs the contribution rate of Nokia was at ~80%, wheras the Qt Company is rather at ~40% and with focus on stuff they can sell. I regularly meet people who bought a licence to use the Qt framework not realizing that they could use it under LGPL. I know the wording of the commercial license. It places the licensee clearly worse than with the LGPL variant. Personally, I find the business practices of this company, which have been observed for some time, rather questionable.I had a commercial license with Trolltech, which cost me a lot of money. As soon as LGPL was available, I cancelled the contracts and avoided projects that could not be done with LGPL rather than signing such a single-edge contract with this company.