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Qt and Open Source

qt.io

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101–110 of 138 posts

Re: Qt and Open Source

#101

Post by jcelerier »

justinclift wrote: post #97
de_watcher wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's FUD. It's in virtually every Linux distribution as binary and source. You don't need a "Qt Account".

It's not FUD. Grab the official Qt installer, and try downloading anything: http://download.qt.io/official_releases/online_installers/ It will not work unless you sign in with a Qt Account.

They can only do that for the packages they build themselves, which are mainly useful to enterprise customers.

Qt being under LGPL, there is nothing that prevents anyone else from redistributing open-source builds of Qt - Debian / Ubuntu through apt, MSYS2 (pacman -S mingw-w64-qt5-whatever), homebrew (brew install qt), conan (conan install qt/5.14.0@bincrafters/stable), vcpkg (vcpkg install qt5)...

Re: Qt and Open Source

#102

Post by jabl »

jfkebwjsbx wrote: post #66
yoz-y wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming the project is a library or a tool that people will need to somehow embed in their program I wouldn't go with GPL. It has some restrictions that are for various reasons hard to accept for a large amount of clients. People try arguing that "you could do this or that to accommodate" but the fact is that many for-profit corporations, even those working with open projects, will have a no-GPL policy. Also with th…

Even LGPL is banned in many companies. And some devs want static linking without releasing object files.

To some extent LGPL and other "weak" copyleft licenses like MPL or EPL are in an awkward middle-way spot in that they have disadvantages of both full copyleft and liberal licenses, but not that much upside.

Either go full GPL, or even AGPL, or then use a liberal license like Apache-2, IMHO.

Re: Qt and Open Source

#103

Post by de_watcher »

Deganta wrote: post #98
de_watcher wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can link statically. Oh my god, we've been over this infinite number of times.

Yes you can, but if you do that you have to release the Object files and make it possible for the customers to link them to their own Qt version. This is a much greater hassle than just linking dynamically, so we don't do it.

Usually nobody asks to release. It's a risk to get that kind of request, but it's way more trivial than routine software development risks.

Re: Qt and Open Source

#104

Post by gmueckl »

slezyr wrote: post #93
Deganta wrote: post #88

I think Qt needs to rethink their licensing model. Currently you either pay them a LOT of money for everything they offer, or you don't pay them anything and just use the LGPL version (when that's possible). It seems their current strategy is to milk the users that can't use the LGPL users as much as possible, Additionally they try to convince as many people as possible that the LGPL version won't work for them, by h…

> My company currently uses the LGPL version of Qt, and would gladly pay for the commercial one. In the Trolltech and Nokia days they actually did pay for it, but the prices are no longer affordable us. So we are stuck with the LGPL version for now. Huh, price isn't even a THAT big problem. Software developed with LGPL version can't use the commercial one. > 2.13. If I have started development of a project using the…

There is no legal barrier for them to relicense Qt from LGPL to a commercial license for a customer. They are just strongarming customers into paying for licenses early on during development by refusing to do so.

Re: Qt and Open Source

#105

Post by justinclift »

jcelerier wrote: post #101
justinclift wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not FUD. Grab the official Qt installer, and try downloading anything: http://download.qt.io/official_releases/online_installers/ It will not work unless you sign in with a Qt Account.

They can only do that for the packages they build themselves, which are mainly useful to enterprise customers. Qt being under LGPL, there is nothing that prevents anyone else from redistributing open-source builds of Qt - Debian / Ubuntu through apt, MSYS2 (pacman -S mingw-w64-qt5-whatever), homebrew (brew install qt), conan (conan install qt/5.14.0@bincrafters/stable), vcpkg (vcpkg install qt5)...

Sure. But 99% of people use those packages. Not sure why you say they're only useful for enterprise customers, as they're literally the reference packages. :)

On Linux/BSD though, obviously most people use the in-built package managers where the Qt version is recent enough for their purposes.

Re: Qt and Open Source

#106

Post by de_watcher »

justinclift wrote: post #97
de_watcher wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's FUD. It's in virtually every Linux distribution as binary and source. You don't need a "Qt Account".

It's not FUD. Grab the official Qt installer, and try downloading anything: http://download.qt.io/official_releases/online_installers/ It will not work unless you sign in with a Qt Account.

I took qt-unified-linux-x86-2.0.5-2-online.run, launched, pressed "Skip" when it was asking for the account, and it's downloading.

Have you tried it? Does it ask after the download?

Re: Qt and Open Source

#107

Post by [deleted] »

justinclift wrote: post #97
de_watcher wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's FUD. It's in virtually every Linux distribution as binary and source. You don't need a "Qt Account".

It's not FUD. Grab the official Qt installer, and try downloading anything: http://download.qt.io/official_releases/online_installers/ It will not work unless you sign in with a Qt Account.

[deleted]

Re: Qt and Open Source

#108

Post by justinclift »

de_watcher wrote: post #106
justinclift wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not FUD. Grab the official Qt installer, and try downloading anything: http://download.qt.io/official_releases/online_installers/ It will not work unless you sign in with a Qt Account.

I took qt-unified-linux-x86-2.0.5-2-online.run, launched, pressed "Skip" when it was asking for the account, and it's downloading. Have you tried it? Does it ask after the download?

That's weird. That launcher version you have is version 2.0.5-2. They retired the 2.x series a while back, and it's up to version 3.2.x now which will not work without a Qt account. :(

Oh it looks like you obtained that launcher from the old "archives" directory?

http://download.qt.io/archive/online_installers/2.0/

It's unfortunate that only has an old Linux installer. Saw it yesterday, but needed an OSX downloader and was out of luck. :(

Re: Qt and Open Source

#109

Post by oefrha »

justinclift wrote: post #97
de_watcher wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's FUD. It's in virtually every Linux distribution as binary and source. You don't need a "Qt Account".

It's not FUD. Grab the official Qt installer, and try downloading anything: http://download.qt.io/official_releases/online_installers/ It will not work unless you sign in with a Qt Account.

Not sure about online installers and not keen to find out, but I just built a Qt app last month and used the offline Windows installer for 5.14 from qt.io as part of the Windows build environment setup, and I’m sure I don’t have a Qt account (yeah checked in my password manager), so saying the open source Qt builds can’t be installed without an account is not accurate.

Re: Qt and Open Source

#110

Post by pknopf »

Deganta wrote: post #88

I think Qt needs to rethink their licensing model. Currently you either pay them a LOT of money for everything they offer, or you don't pay them anything and just use the LGPL version (when that's possible). It seems their current strategy is to milk the users that can't use the LGPL users as much as possible, Additionally they try to convince as many people as possible that the LGPL version won't work for them, by h…

My company paid 20,000 dollars, plus a per-royalty, for an on-screen keyboard...
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