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Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't say specifically -dev binaries, it says 'installation of qt binaries' which I need to install any qt based software unless i want to build the libraries from source. If they mean bundling qt binaries in your app they should say that. This makes it seem like everyone needs to register to install anything that relies on having a qt binary installed on your system.

If I install qt through a package manager, do I need to be registered or would the package maintainer need to be registered?

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If you're installing through a package manager, you're probably installing something built from source rather than downloaded as a binary from upstream.

Fair point on that. Still, the rest is somewhat unclear.

> If you're installing through a package manager, you're probably installing something built from source rather than downloaded as a binary from upstream.

I didn't get that impression from linked Qt blog post. I parsed the blog post to mean any/all binaries built. Eg if you build your own binaries from the open source license, you can't distribute them without a commercial or distribution license. Likewise, you can't download Qt binaries without a Qt account. It effectively locks out anyone who's not a developer and doesn't want a Qt account but does want to install some pre-built open source software.

> I didn't get that impression from linked Qt blog post. I parsed the blog post to mean any/all binaries built. Eg if you build your own binaries from the open source license, you can't distribute them without a commercial or distribution license.

They can't add such limitations without modifying the open source license, which they aren't doing.

It sounds like dynamically linking is ok, but statically linking against Qt is not.

that is 10000% unrelated

Care to elaborate? You are distributing Qt binaries in one case, you aren't in the other.

why would dynamically linked binaries be Qt ones specifically ? every linux distro and a lot of apps do Qt rebuilds which aren't "official Qt framework binaries".

It's LGPL'd. They can't add that restriction.

> The object code form of an Application may incorporate material from a header file that is part of the Library. You may convey such object code under terms of your choice, provided that, <...access to source code provisions...>

> Eg if you build your own binaries from the open source license, you can't distribute them without a commercial or distribution license.

Given it is a known open-source license, (L)GPL, this restriction is obviously impossible.

We'll have to see what license they apply to the binaries. As the copyright holder, they wouldn't have to use (L)GPL. If the binaries are redistributable, then maybe someone will mirror them. Otherwise, people can build them from source, as many Linux distributions already do. If the source license were changed to prevent that, then I think we'd see a hostile fork pretty quickly from the last free and open source version.

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