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Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Qt could be much larger if the licensing terms were not 5d chess for over a decade.

Unfortunately, Qt's only interest seems to lay in the squeezing of their old existing customers, an ever-dwindling customer base as embedded socs capable of running web browsers become cheaper and more accessible. They _still_ don't seem to be taking the threat of web technologies seriously; Where web tech can now run on desktop, mobile, and servers, QtWeb is still a legal and technical minefield.

They also stopped distributing precompiled versions of Qt publicly, a baffling decision as it hurts their adoption rates even more.

From what I see, the Qt Company behaves as if web technologies don't exist. It'll be interesting to see how this strategy will play out for them.

There's still plenty of embedded shops stuck thinking "it's embedded so only thing performant enough is C++", despite having multicore SoCs with multiple GBs of memory and integrated GPU. But I agree (and certainly hope so) that the amount of those companies go down.

There are, in fact, still significant differences in price and energy use between "weaker" and "stronger" SoCs.

The license is simply LGPL for almost all modules. Non-LGPL parts are not essential and / or can be replaced without too much trouble (onscreen keyboard). The 5D chess is an illusion created by the Qt Company marketing department - you can simply ignore it.

I think what they're implying is that many people simply discount it as an option because it's not immediately obvious. I have had to explain Qt's LGPL status to MANY people.

Qt is already large enough, what license terms are needed to slim it down even further?

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