[maemo-developers] Qt to be available under the terms of the LGPL

[From: Ville M. Vainio]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 10:55 PM, Andrew Flegg <andrew at bleb.org> wrote:

> Am I missing something big? Please say I am :-)

You are missing the desktop side's point. So far, there has been no
way to implement a cross-platform application and deploy it without
GPL (e.g. perhaps as standard freeware). Perhaps you might have
developed a GPL app you distribute for free on desktop, but make a
smaller version and release it for s60/maemo and try peddling it for
$5/pop. That would be impossible under the old license (and you can't
just buy a commercial license and recompile).

The biggest perk here is that Qt becomes more of an "open standards"
toolkit, and less of a product. This will attract much more developer
interest even from hardcore GPL people. Many projects chose Gtk+ (or
wx, or even Java) because of the licensing issue, regardless of
technical discrepancies.Google has a wealth of flamewars about Qt
licensing, which should now come to end...

-- 
Ville M. Vainio
http://tinyurl.com/vainio