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

[From: Bruce Stephens]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 8:55 PM, Andrew Flegg <andrew at bleb.org> wrote:

> I'm sure it's very exciting for OEMs like VMware to now have the
> option of using Qt rather than GTK in their closed-source UIs. Perhaps
> it's also now an option for Wayfinder. But these people had money, and
> the option of a commercial licence anyway.
>
> Am I missing something big? Please say I am :-)

You're only missing that sometimes even for proprietary software, "no cost"
vs "reasonable cost" matters.  Sometimes the GUI doesn't matter much, and
the license change means developers can consider Qt more easily than before.
(That's probably less the case for Maemo, but generally it seems
likely to be so.)

A more interesting (but likely speculative) question is why Nokia made
the change.
My guess is that internally they regard Qt commercial licensing as a distraction
from their main business, and (though it may be at some level
irrational) they prefer
to exchange the income (and distraction) for the positive publicity.