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Comment by hellofunk | Hacker News Reader

The license for QT has been evolving quite a lot over the last year or two, which makes many developers very nervous to use it without a paid license. Have you seen what they’re doing?

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The terms of their commercial license may have been evolving, but the terms of the open source has not. GPL is GPL and LGPL is LGPL. The terms of those licenses prohibit additional restrictions (notably, you are not allowed to add a noncommercial clause to the GPL/LGPL) and the Qt company cannot make their own open source license that is noncommercial otherwise they'd violate the KDE Free Qt Agreement. The most they seem to have been thinking about doing was witholding the open source releases for 12 mo. which is unfortunate, but they are required to keep an open source version around because of the KDE Free Qt Agreement[1], otherwise they are required to release the framework under the BSD license.

Autodesk Maya notably does not use a commercial Qt license, they use it under the LGPL. You can find the source code for their patches of Qt on their website. [2]

[1] https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php

[2] https://www.autodesk.com/company/legal-notices-trademarks/op...

That's fascinating, I didn't realize Maya was non-commercial Qt. I wonder why; Autodesk can certainly afford a license.

Maybe they simply see no value in keeping their modifications to qt to themselves and value in up streaming it ensuring they no longer have to maintain the code. This makes a lot of sense they are in the business of providing world class software not gui frameworks.

I am not sure if it's still this way, but I think at least some versions of the Qt Commercial License disallowed you from having user scripting in your application - or at least, exposing Qt APIs to user scripting. So no bindings like PySide or PyQt and the like could be used.

even more flabbergasting is Tesla using it under LGPL in their cars. They had to be forced into compliance though: https://twitter.com/qtproject/status/998902009922285568?lang...

http://www.olafsw.de/a-better-qt-because-of-open-source-and-...

Specifically this:

> In case The Qt Company would ever attempt to close down Open Source Qt, the foundation is entitled to publish Qt under the BSD license. This notable legal guarantee strengthens Qt. It creates trust among developers, contributors and customers.

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