Hi,
Note that I am not a lawyer, and also note that a generic comment may not be
applicable in a specific case. If there is a company who wants to clarify their
usage of Qt, it is best done by directly talking about that case. Remember,
that the restriction on mixing is only relevant when Qt is commercially
licensed.
That said, see comments inline below. Hopefully this clarifies, and does not
confuse more.
Yours,
Tuukka
From: Jean-Michaël Celerier <jeanmichael.celer...@gmail.com>
Date: Tuesday 31. March 2020 at 22.02
To: Tuukka Turunen <tuukka.turu...@qt.io>
Cc: Jérôme Godbout <godbo...@amotus.ca>, "interest@qt-project.org"
<interest@qt-project.org>
Subject: Re: [Interest] Qt Creator licensing for companies with Qt Commercial
developers
Regarding 5. :
> Large company F is creating a product with Qt under commercial license. Part
> of the work is subcontracted to Company G that uses Qt under commercial
> license. Company G subcontracts some of the work further to low-cost Company
> H, who uses Qt under open-source license. This is not allowed.
Could you clarify these cases :
1/ Is "Qt under open-source license" limited to the downloads on
qt.io<http://qt.io>, or any software code related to Qt ?
TTT: In the case of mixing, what matters is the content of the commercial
license agreement, i.e. what items have been licensed commercially. Typically
Qt Creator is included, for example.
1/ a. Does this also cover people doing apt-get install qtcreator on Debian or
brew install qtcreator on macOS
TTT: It does not matter how the open-source version of Qt (or any part of it)
is acquired.
1/ b. Does this also cover forks of Qt ? say, company H builds a plug-in using
Copperspice for the software ordered by company F. Does company H need to take
a Qt license ?
TTT: To my understanding, yes as long as the fork contains parts of what has
been commercially licensed (or their earlier versions).
1/ c. Does this also cover WebKit / Blink engines, which come from KHTML, which
was developed at some point in the past with open-source Qt and thus every
software using a derivative of WebKit on earth ? (electron, chrome, microsoft
edge, etc)... eg. if I, as company H, ship an electron app in the context of
the project of company F (say, the electron app is opened when a button is
pressed in the app developed by company F), do I also need to get a Qt license ?
TTT: The upstream 3rd party copyright parts no, the Qt parts yes.
And, if the answer to c. is "no", how is that different from company H
"subcontracting" by developing a library with open-source Qt, putting it on the
Qt market place, and having company G download it and integrate it to its
project ?
Thanks for your answers so far,
Jean-Michaël
On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 7:32 PM Tuukka Turunen
<tuukka.turu...@qt.io<mailto:tuukka.turu...@qt.io>> wrote:
Hi Jérôme et al,
This thread has long ago left the original question and become a discussion
about Qt licensing in general and especially about the point of not mixing
commercial Qt with open-source version of Qt.
The key point is: The Qt Company, just like Trolltech initially and other
companies in between, does not want mixing open-source Qt and commercial Qt.
Reason is simple: if mixing was allowed, many companies would use it to pay
less for their use of Qt.
It is unfortunate that also real open-source projects may be affected in some
cases. Majority of users are not affected in any way.
It is also unfortunate if licensing is felt to be so complex that it is better
to use some other technology. Commercial licensing of Qt is quite flexible and
it is also possible to negotiate and ask for advice in case it is unclear what
is allowed and what not.
Here are some examples that hopefully clarify the point about mixing
open-source and commercial:
Example 1: Company A has 10 developers creating a product. 5 of them use Qt
under commercial license and 5 do not use Qt at all. This is ok.
Example 2: Company B has 10 developers creating a product. 5 of them use Qt
under open-source license and 5 do not use Qt at all. This is ok.
Example 3: Company C has 10 developers creating a product. 5 of them use Qt
under commercial license and 5 use Qt under open-source license. This is not
allowed.
Example 4: Large company D is creating a product with Qt under commercial
license. Part of the work is subcontracted to Company E that uses Qt under
commercial license. This is ok.
Example 5: Large company F is creating a product with Qt under commercial
license. Part of the work is subcontracted to Company G that uses Qt under
commercial license. Company G subcontracts some of the work further to low-cost
Company H, who uses Qt under open-source license. This is not allowed.
Example 6: Company I is building two independent products with separate
development teams. One development team uses Qt under commercial license to
create product 1 and the other development team uses Qt under open-source
license to create product 2. This is ok.
Hopefully I was able to clarify the topic with these examples. The Qt Company
wants to provide Qt under open-source license. There is no mega corporation
with deep pockets behind. Development of Qt is funded with the revenues gained
from commercial licensing.
Yours,
Tuukka
From: Jérôme Godbout <godbo...@amotus.ca<mailto:godbo...@amotus.ca>>
Date: Tuesday 31. March 2020 at 17.56
To: Tuukka Turunen <tuukka.turu...@qt.io<mailto:tuukka.turu...@qt.io>>, Andy
<asmalo...@gmail.com<mailto:asmalo...@gmail.com>>
Cc: "interest@qt-project.org<mailto:interest@qt-project.org>"
<interest@qt-project.org<mailto:interest@qt-project.org>>
Subject: RE: [Interest] Qt Creator licensing for companies with Qt Commercial
developers
Hi,
the mix is not a corner case, it’s the reality of many people around. We are a
services compagnie, and this is really a headache to understand where it should
fall since we do project for client but we are a single cie. The license of Qt
have is such an ambiguity and our lawyer recommend (not even sure himself where
we do fall) we avoid using it as much as we can given the context we are in.
When a client have commercial license, we ask them to use their infrastructure
and avoid having any commercial license on premise (we cannot take any chance).
If you think your licensing is clear and make it easy, it ain’t, we do more and
more Xamarin, just for license reason not because we like it. I continue Qt
mostly on hobby, really like Qml and where the binding in C++ is heading. But
for my work job, Qt is fading out.
The departure between mixing LGPL and Commercial one is such a gray area,
nobody want to venture anywhere there.
Note: I don’t speak in the name of my cie, but my own opinion here. Just
stating the fact that the Qt license is the main reason we often ditch Qt for
some application.
From: Interest
<interest-boun...@qt-project.org<mailto:interest-boun...@qt-project.org>> On
Behalf Of Tuukka Turunen
Sent: March 31, 2020 10:33 AM
To: Andy <asmalo...@gmail.com<mailto:asmalo...@gmail.com>>
Cc: interest@qt-project.org<mailto:interest@qt-project.org>
Subject: Re: [Interest] Qt Creator licensing for companies with Qt Commercial
developers
Hi Andy,
You are asking to explicitly define terms like project, company, product. These
are rarely possible to define outside of the generic use of the term and each
individual contract. I assume you understand that it is not possible to take
any stand of those in an email. We have these listed in the FAQ and contracts
in as clear way as we have been able to list these.
I have also tried to explain these, but your tone feels rather aggressive. I do
not understand what makes you say: “Even a solo developer needs to hire a
lawyer before touching anything Qt-related.” For most of the situation the
licensing of Qt is really simple and also very permissive. Yes, there are
certain complex corner cases, like mixing of commercial on open-source versions
of the Qt framework/tools. But how often do you need to mix these? Most of the
Qt users are using either the commercial or the open-source version.
Yours,
Tuukka
From: Andy <asmalo...@gmail.com<mailto:asmalo...@gmail.com>>
Date: Tuesday 31. March 2020 at 16.47
To: Tuukka Turunen <tuukka.turu...@qt.io<mailto:tuukka.turu...@qt.io>>
Cc: Giuseppe D'Angelo
<giuseppe.dang...@kdab.com<mailto:giuseppe.dang...@kdab.com>>,
"interest@qt-project.org<mailto:interest@qt-project.org>"
<interest@qt-project.org<mailto:interest@qt-project.org>>
Subject: Re: [Interest] Qt Creator licensing for companies with Qt Commercial
developers
> "This is at the moment not listed as an allowed case..."
And this again is here the Qt company is digging it's own grave.
What constitutes a "product"? If a company has one team working on an open
source library and another team using it in a proprietary application - what
then? What if an internal tool uses some code or a library from proprietary
application? What if...
Even a solo developer needs to hire a lawyer before touching anything
Qt-related.
Once you start trying to codify all the different scenarios in your licensing,
it becomes toxic and people will avoid it
---
Andy Maloney // https://asmaloney.com
twitter ~ @asmaloney<https://twitter.com/asmaloney>
On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 9:36 AM Tuukka Turunen
<tuukka.turu...@qt.io<mailto:tuukka.turu...@qt.io>> wrote:
Hi,
The point of the "Prohibited combination" is to prevent a company or a chain of
companies (like in a typical subcontracting scenario) from making part of the
product with non-paid Qt and part with paid. Qt being as defined in the
commercial license agreement, i.e. including tools and framework. This was what
the person initiating this mail thread asked about. I do agree that it gets
complex when one starts including items created by an independent third party.
This is at the moment not listed as an allowed case, even though it is not
something we specifically aimed to prevent.
Yours,
Tuukka
On 31.3.2020, 15.03, "Interest on behalf of Giuseppe D'Angelo via Interest"
<interest-boun...@qt-project.org<mailto:interest-boun...@qt-project.org> on
behalf of interest@qt-project.org<mailto:interest@qt-project.org>> wrote:
On 3/31/20 1:22 PM, Tuukka Turunen wrote:
> For completely independent projects/products this is fine. Note that
these really should not be same or in practice the same - or in any way
depending, relating, using etc each other as defined in the license agreement.
>
> See licensing FAQ question 2.7
athttps://www.qt.io/faq/<http://www.qt.io/faq/> and License agreement
athttps://www.qt.io/terms-conditions/<http://www.qt.io/terms-conditions/>
It is still unclear if the usage of Qt _Creator_ for developing some
code would cause such code to fall under the restrictions of commercial
licensing.
Here's a few scenarios:
1) I have a Qt commercial license. In my project using commercial Qt I
want to use a library developed by
1a) some other team in my company;
1b) someone else.
This other library is under a liberal license; does NOT use Qt itself in
any way; but has been developed using Qt Creator (GPL). Can I use it in
my product under the commercial license? Or would it fall under the
"Prohibited Combination":
> “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
Does "created with" here extend to GPL Creator?
2) Same as 1, but this time with the library using Qt (as in: using
headers, linking against it). Example: a Qt-based library coming from
KDE Frameworks, developed using Creator.
Thanks,
--
Giuseppe D'Angelo |
giuseppe.dang...@kdab.com<mailto:giuseppe.dang...@kdab.com> | Senior Software
Engineer
KDAB (France) S.A.S., a KDAB Group company
Tel. France +33 (0)4 90 84 08 53, http://www.kdab.com
KDAB - The Qt, C++ and OpenGL Experts
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