On Tuesday, 31 March 2020 18:02:15 BST Tuukka Turunen wrote: > Hi, > > I apologise, if I have been unclear with words 'company' and project'. If > you read the license agreement and faq behind the links I have posted > multiple times, it should be rather clear what is meant. > Yours, > > Tuukka
Dear Tukka, Frankly, I think you're arguing in bad faith here. It's patently obvious from every response in this thread that the Qt Company's position is *not* clear to anyone outside the company. The FAQ doesn't address the project/company distinction at all, and linking 20,000 words of legalese in "answer" to a boolean question is just a refusal to give a straight answer. Having looked through said document, the relevant sections seem to be: > 1. ... “Prohibited Combination” shall mean any means to (i) use, combine, incorporate, link or integrate Licensed Software with any software created with or incorporating Open Source Qt, (ii) use Licensed Software for creation of any software created with or incorporating Open Source Qt, or (iii) incorporate or integrate Applications into a hardware device or product other than a Device. ... Can't use licensed Qt Creator to develop open-source Qt apps; ok. > 3.4 [viii]: Licensee shall not and shall cause that its Affiliates or Contractors shall not use Licensed Software in any Prohibited Combination, unless Licensee has received an advance written permission from The Qt Company to do so. Can't use licensed and GPL Qt in the same project; ok. > Absent such written permission, any and all distribution by the Licensee during the Term of a hardware device or product a) which incorporate or integrate any part of Licensed Software or Open Source Qt; or b) where the main user interface or substantial functionality is provided by software built with Licensed Software or Open Source Qt or otherwise depends on the Licensed Software or Open Source Qt, shall be considered to be Device distribution under this Agreement and shall be dependent on Licensee’s compliance thereof (including but not limited to obligation to pay applicable License Fees for such distribution). It's unclear here whether this should be read as "hardware (device or product)" or "(hardware device) or product". Could you please clarify the intent? Taking the latter, more pessimistic reading there's no project/company distinction; any entity licensing Qt can't distribute the GPL version in any 'product' which I believe would include open-source projects. Hard luck Thiago et al! > Notwithstanding what is provided above in this sub-section (viii), Licensee is entitled to use and combine Qt 3D Studio and/or Qt Design Studio with Open Source Qt (“Permitted Combination”) for its internal evaluation purposes, provided that Licensee shall in no way transfer, publish, disclose, display or otherwise make available any software or work resulting from such Permitted Combination; This exception doesn't cover Qt Creator, and would be in the opposite direction to the original question anyway. So the answer is "no". In general, the only "clear" policy is that The Qt Company deliberately obfuscates the conditions under which the GPL version can be used, to put people off exercising the rights that do exist. This goes along with the general downplaying of, and FUD about, the GPL option on the website, and the bizarre retrospective licensing. It's disrespectful to the outside contributors who've built so much of Qt and its ecosystem in exchange for those rights, and doesn't bode well for the future of Qt in the free software community. Yours, -Francis H _______________________________________________ Interest mailing list Interest@qt-project.org https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/interest