[colejohnson66]

Kindof like Qt? They have it set up so you can use it under the LGPL terms, but if you pay them, you can negotiate a proprietary license (for example: if you wanted to statically link[a]).

[a]: The LGPL allows proprietary usage, but only when the LGPL library is dynamically linked in. The reason being that if it’s a separate binary file (.so, .dll, etc.), the user can replace it with their own version. If you statically link it (embed it in the program binary), the full GPL kicks in (IIRC).

[nottorp]

Whoever owns Qt now is so threatening (I suppose they think of it as "aggressive marketing" but it's really threats) that it looks safer to treat Qt as GPL, or avoid it entirely.

[chipotle_coyote]

Whoever owns Qt is: Qt. They were spun off from Digia (the company that bought them from Nokia) in 2016.

It felt like Qt was (relatively speaking) all over the place when they were owned by Nokia, but have been in a slow decline of mindshare for years. Of course, that's concurrent with the rise of Electron as the cross-platform app wunderkind.

[nottorp]

When they were owned by Nokia you knew Nokia wants Qt to be used everywhere. Now it's not safe to use it without a lawyer on retainer.

Plus, from my friends who still do Qt, they're trying to turn it into an Electron-like platfom with Qt Quick and QML and the result isn't exactly the dependable platform that we used to know and love.

[chipotle_coyote]

That doesn't really surprise me. It's not really a bad idea, but it's also probably an idea that they should have been able to deliver five or six years ago, and maybe had something better than Electron by now. (And of course licensing that didn't scare people off seems like it would have also been a good idea...)