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Comment by seren | Hacker News Reader

I have not been affected but I heard some teams where a QT rep was interested to understand how they were using QT. Skip fast forward 2 years later, they now have to pay QT licenses while they where using the open source version before.

It might have been a good business decision to get more support, or to use some non GPL components, but I can't help to think that the not so friendly push from the QT rep was also a reason...

So I got the feeling this is just another step in that same direction.

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> I have not been affected but I heard some teams where a QT rep was interested to understand how they were using QT. Skip fast forward 2 years later, they now have to pay QT licenses while they where using the open source version before.

Do you mean they weren't compliant with the open source license, or that the rep sold the commercial support?

Honestly, I don't exactly know so my answer is a bit vague. I believe they were compliant but I got the feeling from the discussion that the rep was pushing hard so that they get a commercial license, to not having to bother cherry picking only the GPL components and not having to display licenses and making the source code available. (which was done previously)

It is a bit strange that QT can at the same time boast about its open source roots, but in practice, discouraging its corporate users to use that license, which is understandable from a business perspective.

Your original comment sounded a bit negative towards Qt, but it sounds like either the company was not legally complying with the license (in which case Qt was owed some money) or the company found some benefit in the paid product. In either case, I'm not sure there's a way I would view it negatively (unless Qt changed licensing on some used components such that the company was in compliance in the past but ended up unknowingly not being compliant by the time the rep was talking with them).

Talking to a sales rep isn't always a bad thing. Sometimes they let you know interesting things that are for offer you didn't know about, but would have bought if you did (or can give you trials of things you've been interested in but unwilling to pull the trigger on because you weren't sure how it would work).

My company has been a Qt partner for 10 years now. It’s embarrassing how many companies we met that were not complaining with the open source license — most of them did comply after they talked to us though. Our market (Italy) is specially allergic to runtime licenses (required for embedded products, which is 90% of what companies use Qt for, at least here) so they prefer to bend over for compliance rather than spending on a runtime license.

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