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Comment by umenline | Hacker News Reader

does it remain LGPL ?

From Digia's blog:

With this acquisition Digia will have an increasing responsibility to the global Qt community, not just the commercial licensing business. We believe in the power of the Qt dual license. It is a great value for Qt that it can be used under an open source and commercial license, since customers have different needs and the licenses have different purposes. Digia wants to continue the good co-operation with different individual contributors and companies working together in the Qt Project. We also are committed to continuing the special relationship Qt has with the KDE community via the KDE Free Qt Foundation. We believe that this symbiosis is valuable for everyone involved.

http://www.digia.com/en/Blogs/Qt-blog/Tuukka-Turunen/Dates/2...

You can't un-LGPL something that's been LGPL'd (edit:though you might have to fork). Plus Nokia made a legal covenant with the KDE folks that guarantees Qt stays open, and has failsafe clauses that auto-BSD licenses it if the terms of the covenant are broken.

The parent might be referring to further development, which could perhaps be closed if Digia owns the copyright.

Which would be bad for them, since it effectively releases the current version of Qt under a BSD license:

http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.p...

How bad that would be remains to be seen. It highly depends on how much external work from external contributors is going into qt. if most of the work comes from internal employees, then the BSD fork that was auto-created will stagnate while they can add all the cool stuff to their commercial offering.

They could then proceed to make their maintained version as incompatible as possible to the open source version.

The outcome will likely be a very two very different versions of a toolkit.

One based on BSD qt, maintained by the KDE project, more and more losing its cross-platform features (why would KDE care about platforms it doesn't run on).

The other will be the commercial continuation of old qt. Incompatible with the open source version, but keeping its cross-platform features and seeing heavy development and feature additions.

Of course this is just speculation, but it is at least conceivable.

Don't the the four voting members of the foundation have to vote to BSD license Qt? Its not auto kick-in right?

I think there are a ton of partiess that would be interested in developing a BSD modern GUI framework like Qt 5.

Technically yes; but the KDE side of the board wins any ties[0]. If KDE feels it's best to BSD it (don't see a logical reason why they wouldn't), it will happen.

[0] http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.p...

Trolltech made that legal covenant a long time ago, while Nokia and Digia are bound to it by the purchase of the business.

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