It's worth noting that there are specific add-on modules that are only available under the GPLv3 license. Qt6 doesn't have all of them yet, and they (supposedly) will be coming in the 6.1-6.2 releases.
Well, the more software uses GPLv3 the better. All the locked bootloader shenanigans and software patent FUD is really getting out of hand and more widely used GPLv3 software can help at least a bit.
It's perfectly possible to use an LGPL library for commercial purposes (and lots of companies do). There's just some criteria you have to follow like allowing end-users to re-link their own version of the library and giving back any code changes made to the library itself (which in my experience it was never necessary to make any patches to Qt itself). Whether that extra burden is worth it vs. just paying for a commercial license is up to the individual company.
> which is a shitty thing to do when you're not a mom&pop shop but a company like...
Why? That's the whole point of LGPL, it doesn't matter how big you are, so long as your users can replace your copy of Qt with a modified copy you can use it under LGPL.
> In fact, it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
Just like my answer to the other comment, there are a ton of "perfectly reasonable" things that one can do, that are still shitty behaviour.
That's like when someone leaves free books for anyone to take, you'd take one but never put another one for other people. You're not breaking any laws or rules. Still shitty. Especially if you have enough money to build a whole freaking library.
I do agree with you, but in the specific case of free book sharing - I hear that most of the time, the problems is too many books rather than too few, so you should really not worry about taking a book even if you are not sure you're going to put another one for other people.
But Qt chose to release under the LGPL. If they had wanted to restrict unpaid use of Qt to Free and Open Source software, they could have done so with the GPL licence.
the point is not to restrict - it's to give back when you have more than enough capital to do so.
Like, anyone can go to a food bank charity to have a free meal. If you have a 5-digit monthly salary, that is still a very shitty thing to do, even if you and everyone else plays by the rules.
Even Autodesk, which uses Qt for pretty much all its products, including Maya, doesn't pay a cent for Qt. Same with The Foundry. As soon as Nokia made LGPL licensed python bindings for Qt, they dropped PyQt, stopped paying or contributing, and just went on freeloading.
I think combination of JUCE/IntelliJ pricing and Unreal Engine model would be a sweet spot:
1) Personal License - free if <50k annual revenue
2) Startup License - keep current price (500usd/month) but
a) allow 1 month subscription commitment instead of paying 1 year upfront
b) when subscription not get extended you should still be allowed to distribute product that is not updated
c) if you payed for 1-2 years of subscriptions and cancelled subscription after 1-2+ year, you should be able to keep using the version of Qt the moment when you first signed for .
3) allow Startup to choose another licensing option. Instead of paying upfront licensing fee, just allow paying annually 5% of revenue from products that keep using Qt.
The company behind Qt has been getting very passive-aggressive in the last 1..2 years about using the LGPL version for commercial projects. They didn't shut it down (yet?) but they're definitely not happy about it. Personally I wouldn't consider Qt for future projects because the writing is on the wall.
Luckily the LGPL license can never be revoked on previously released versions. So it's possible to use Qt 5 and never have to worry (as long as you follow the requirements of the license in terms of dynamically linking the libraries).
That’s true for 6 as well. I believe there are clauses in Qt’s ownership documents that prevent it from ever becoming closed source without automatically invalidating previous licenses and becoming GPL-only, or something to that effect. The poison-pill was designed when Trolltech first sold away Qt, if i remember correctly.
