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Comment by dtquad | Hacker News Reader

Big companies like Autodesk and Tesla are using the LGPL version of Qt without paying a cent to the Qt company.

It was a business mistake by the Nokia in 2009 to offer the non-commercial version of Qt as LGPL. They should just have continued using GPL.

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> It was a business mistake by the Nokia in 2009 to offer the non-commercial version of Qt as LGPL.

I don't think so. At the time I'm sure their goal was to have Qt as the development platform for all their phone hardware in time, while the profit would have come from phone sales. Using LGPL would have encouraged adoption by all developers.

What they didn't know in 2009 was that their hardware business will collapse. Or be collapsed.

I worked at a small company that used Qt using the LGPL version of Qt with paying a cent to Qt. I thought we should probably pay for it, but the terms of the commercial device license made that unbearable.

While Autodesk is a big company, I could see trying to use a commercial licence as impractical for them. If they tried, what would it mean for their no cost editions, what would it mean for their plugin developers, what would it mean for their customers who do custom development on to of it? I think the paid licenses would be a disaster in all cases.

Well, they keep making the commercial license worse, so if Qt were GPL, companies would probably just use something else.

isn't that at least partially due to the kde agreement? https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/

>> The core libraries of Qt (Essentials) and all existing LGPL-licensed Qt add-ons must continue to be available under the LGPLv3.

The original Qt-KDE agreement from 2000 was GPLv2.

might wanna add some context as to how that's relevant to the current time frame and situation

Nokia decided to use the LGPL and the KDE Free Qt agreement was then updated to specify LGPL.

I don't see how that knowledge is changing anything. We can only talk what is as of the qt company and just before

I’m no expert, but this link says that you have to include install instructions:

https://www.tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-lesser-general-public-...

How are Tesla using it? If it’s in their cars, how do they comply with this?

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