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by tim-- 2214 days ago
They have not changed any licensing. They have changed the way they are releasing their product. The only thing really that is different here is the fact that they are pushing less code as open source for their stable LTS releases.

If you rely on having a stable Qt, why not pay the company that develops the software? You and I, the developers that use Qt without paying for it, still get the latest and greatest Qt, with all it's source code for free, under the same LGPL license that Qt has always been under.
3 comments
ognarb 2214 days ago
Actually Qt was not always LGPL, it was first under the QPL, then the GPL, and now the LGPL. So it is quite an improvement from a license forbidding commercial uses to a permissive license.

There is also a legal framework to make sure Qt will remain open source forever: the KDE Free Qt Foundation.

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tim-- 2214 days ago
Historically you are correct, yes. I should have had an asterisk and explanation next to 'always'.

The fun fact that this also brings up is that the KDE Free Qt Foundation also means that if Qt does not keep supporting open source Qt, then the framework code becomes licensed under the BSD.

It is literally in Qt's best interests to keep the open source community by it's side.

This does not detract from my point that the license of Qt is not changing.

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pedro2 2214 days ago
It was not just LTS. The rumor [1] was:

  > As a result, they are thinking about restricting ALL Qt releases to paid license holders for the first 12 months.
  > They are aware that this would mean the end of contributions via Open Governance in practice.
[1] https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.h...
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cy_hauser 2214 days ago
> If you rely on having a stable Qt, why not pay the company that develops the software?

Because it's too expensive for me to afford. More than an order of magnitude too high for me. As side projects I write closed source software so they do pull in a a bit of money. But this is typically only a few hundred to a few thousand per year per app. I think they target corporations rather than individuals or small shops.

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