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

[From: Lorn Potter]

Bruce Stephens wrote:
> 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.

two words: "Qt Everywhere"

> 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.

We are still selling Qt as a multi licensed software, we still sell commercial licenses to those
companies and people that want to keep their code closed.

At the same time, we are offering support as a separate offering, so Nokia can now also make money
from selling GPL, LGPL users support. As well, it removes restrictions for being able to use
community contributions.

So, if anything, it's a bigger market.


-- 
Lorn 'ljp' Potter
Software Engineer, Qt Software, Nokia Pty Ltd