> I got laughed at and waved off when asking for the budget needed to buy/licence QT stuff.
This.
Regardless of Qt's technical merit, it's licensing automatically takes it out of the table of most of all potential projects.
This.
Regardless of Qt's technical merit, it's licensing automatically takes it out of the table of most of all potential projects.
From their site <https://www.qt.io/download-open-source>: LGPL – Any modification to a Qt component covered by the GNU Lesser General Public License must be contributed back to the community. This is the primary open source Qt license, which covers the majority of Qt modules.
If you're not familiar, in practice, the difference between GPL and LGPL is that LGPL does allow dynamically linking a library with a closed source program, without requiring that the program also becomes GPL/LGPL. This is compatible with most development as long as you either don't modify Qt, or are ok with those modifications becoming open source.
The anti-tivoization clauses mean you need to provide a way to install user-built Qt libraries on the target device. You might think that's not a big deal until you go to work for an automotive or medical company and meet up with the massive wall of lawyers that tell you no fucking way.
The problem is typically people not bothering to understand the L in LGPL.
You're missing the whole point.
It's irrelevant whether projects should have a budget or not.
The whole point is that there are plenty of alternatives that do not require thousands of dollars per year*developer, nor do require lawyers to audit releases.
On the desktop you can go Electron, but you then pay penalties in performance that not everyone is willing to endure.
In the embedded space there is little or no alternative.
The actual LGPLv3 text has zero instances of the word "commercial" or the word "consumer" so interpretation is all we can go by.
> A “User Product” is either (1) a “consumer product”, which means any tangible personal property which is normally used for personal, family, or household purposes, or (2) anything designed or sold for incorporation into a dwelling.
The FSF felt that consumers needed protected from tivoization but commercial users did not since they had the financial resources to fight for themselves with contract law.
The FSF felt that consumers needed protected from tivoization but commercial users did not since they had the financial resources to fight for themselves with contract law.
No, LGPL also excludes projects from most commercial software.
Also, keep in mind that this is not a choice between Qt with a paid license or Qt with LGPL. It's a choice between Qt and any other framework, and licensing alone makes Qt a very poor choice.
e.g. if I look at what I can find for docking widgets (and I have hardly ever seen an actual useful software for content creation without a whole set of dozens of docks): https://caduandrade.github.io/docking_flutter_demo/#/ like, is this a joke?
Like, it was certainly a very shitty move given how much they make but if fucking Tesla managed to use the LGPL Qt in their car dashboard, surely your app can do it too
Electron is not just a joke but a fat pig.
Truth is there's nothing comparable to Qt in the cross plataform world today, unless you are willing to take the risk of Flutter, JUCE, some web technology (which would be regarded as obsolete by the time you ship your product), etc.
https://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/campaigns/touchgfx-adva...
When I want to get paid for stuff I develop with the work of Qt devs, then like in other profession, I pay the creators of tools I get money to put bread on the table.
They also need to buy bread, so it is only fair we share the same conditions.
For me, it seems like Jetbrains vs. Borland/Inprise/Codegear/Embarcadero. Jetbrains always had reasonable prices, but a huge amount of customers. Embarcadero tries to milk the few customers that remain.
Qt is like Embarcadero.
When everyone wants free beer, in the end they get Electron.
Which uses webkit, which is LGPL :D
It seems all the people here who complain about QT's license never bothered to read the license of anything else.
Qt on the other hand is used a lot and new projects are started with Qt everyday. Qt is not Embarcadero.
C++/WinRT is a joy to use for anyone whose maximum of productivity was using Visual C++ 6.0 for COM development, exactly the same Visual Studio tooling. /s
So plenty of enterprises do new projects in C++ Builder, and Delphi comes for the ride.
https://entwickler-konferenz.de/
I know of a company in Belgium that does laboratory automation software in Delphi, because they don't want to use languages like C and C++, and .NET lacked the low level coding and native compilation that they want.
For them it isn't legacy, rather from their point of view the alternatives suck, and they will keep at it as long as they can.
maybe consider licensing that "potential project" under a license that allows you to use the OpenSource Qt version?
It's ok for activists to feel that free software is the solution to every problem in the world, but back in the real world there are projects for which open source is not an option and parroting activist mantras is not helpful.
You'd have to provide a way to relink.
I seriously can't see a judge ever being able or willing to understand what's at stake here in case this ever gets to court.