Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Announcing the Qt Automotive Suite

blog.qt.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 64 posts

Re: Announcing the Qt Automotive Suite

#11

Post by fs111 »

karmicthreat wrote: post #6
lultimouomo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my understanding of the licensing, that doesn't sound right. The internal product will be subject to the LGPL, but eve if that's a problem you only need to make sure you don't distribute it to anyone so that no one can ask you to oblige to the license.

Yea, that was my understanding of it also. I think they are trying to make the argument that once the your code is written under LGPL, its LGPL forever and can't have another license.

If that was true, then QT would violate this principle itself and could not sell you a commercial license.

Re: Announcing the Qt Automotive Suite

#12

Post by distances »

lultimouomo wrote: post #9
joezydeco wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's always been a quirk of the Qt licensing. If you intend to launch a closed-source* product at some future date and pay the per-unit licensing fees, the developer needs a seat license from day one. (* closed-source or code that statically links in the Qt libraries)

That sounds like FUD* - Qt's LGPL is LGPL without modifications, so it does not have any quirk. Is it written in the commercial license that you cannot buy it if you have used the LGPL license? * Not accusing you of course; I'm totally convinced that it can come from a misguided sales rep trying to close a deal as early as possible.

Qt-as-the-company has always made it very clear that you can't switch your Qt LGPL/GPL project to a commercial one if you didn't start with the commercial Qt license from the beginning.

You're right, it does sound a bit nasty. No, I haven't read the license myself. It's been brought up multiple times on official Qt blog comments and mailing lists, though.

Edit: checked it now, and it's clearly written at https://www.qt.io/faq/, "Developing with a Commercial License":

> Q: If I have started development of a project using the open source version (LGPL), can I later purchase a commercial version of Qt and move my code under that license?

> A: This is not permitted without written consent from The Qt Company. If you have already started the development with an open-source version of Qt, please contact The Qt Company to resolve the issue.

Re: Announcing the Qt Automotive Suite

#13

Post by karmicthreat »

lultimouomo wrote: post #9
joezydeco wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's always been a quirk of the Qt licensing. If you intend to launch a closed-source* product at some future date and pay the per-unit licensing fees, the developer needs a seat license from day one. (* closed-source or code that statically links in the Qt libraries)

That sounds like FUD* - Qt's LGPL is LGPL without modifications, so it does not have any quirk. Is it written in the commercial license that you cannot buy it if you have used the LGPL license? * Not accusing you of course; I'm totally convinced that it can come from a misguided sales rep trying to close a deal as early as possible.

I found the applicable text: https://www.qt.io/terms-conditions/

*NOTE: If Licensee, or another third party, has, at any time, developed or distributed all (or any portions of) the Application(s) using an open source version of Qt licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1 or later (“LGPL”) or the GNU General Public License version 2.0 or later (“GPL”), Licensee may contact The Qt Company via email to address sales@qt.io to ask for the necessary permission to combine such development work with the Licensed Software. The Qt Company shall evaluate Licensee´s request, and respond to the request with estimated license costs and other applicable terms and details relating to the permission for the Licensee, depending on the actual situation in question. Copies of the licenses referred to above are located at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html, http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html, http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/info/GPLv2.html, and http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl-3.0.html.

So really the questionable term isn't an additional term on the LGPL, it is on the commercial license.

Re: Announcing the Qt Automotive Suite

#14

Post by loeg »

joezydeco wrote: post #10
lultimouomo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like FUD* - Qt's LGPL is LGPL without modifications, so it does not have any quirk. Is it written in the commercial license that you cannot buy it if you have used the LGPL license? * Not accusing you of course; I'm totally convinced that it can come from a misguided sales rep trying to close a deal as early as possible.

The LGPL thing is not really the issue here. It's how Trolltech/Nokia/Digia/QtCo approached the payment of a commercial license. It's always been explained to me by the sales people that "you cannot switch licensing models mid-stream". So if you're planning to go commercial, you start commercial. It's not really about closing the deal as much as making sure the Trolltech developers were paid during the time you neede…

> It's not really about closing the deal as much as making sure the Trolltech developers were paid during the time you needed their support.

The OSS license doesn't grant you any support from Trolltech, does it?

Re: Announcing the Qt Automotive Suite

#15

Post by lultimouomo »

karmicthreat wrote: post #13
lultimouomo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like FUD* - Qt's LGPL is LGPL without modifications, so it does not have any quirk. Is it written in the commercial license that you cannot buy it if you have used the LGPL license? * Not accusing you of course; I'm totally convinced that it can come from a misguided sales rep trying to close a deal as early as possible.

I found the applicable text: https://www.qt.io/terms-conditions/ *NOTE: If Licensee, or another third party, has, at any time, developed or distributed all (or any portions of) the Application(s) using an open source version of Qt licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1 or later (“LGPL”) or the GNU General Public License version 2.0 or later (“GPL”), Licensee may contact The Qt…

That is very interesting. Note that they are not precluding you to switch, but they do reserve the right to sell or not sell to you the commercial license after you've used the LGPL. It sounds like an empty threat to me (if you talk to the sales rep and say "I have an internal prototype and I would like to buy the commercial license to finish and distribute it", will they say no?), but one should definitely consider this before choosing to try the LGPL version for early product development.

I think this is mostly meant to avoid having a team of 50 develop an internal version based on LGPL, and then a team of 1 maintain the commercial version, paying a single developer seat.

Note that you can still do a throw away prototype without problems. Some say you should in any case!

Re: Announcing the Qt Automotive Suite

#16

Post by Nokinside »

karmicthreat wrote: post #3

So I'm remaking a product and was approaching qt about the commercial version. The rep was very insistent that I can not develop an internal prototype using the open source license and then move to the commercial license. So that makes qt pretty unattractive to me since I have to pony up cash and hope it's good. What I would like is something like electron that can run on a frame buffer. What's the current state of t…

Why can't you ship commercial version with LGPL? It's LGPL not GPL?

I mean, if you don't need to modify the Qt-library, you don't need commercial license. You just need to provide link to the Qt-sources.

Re: Announcing the Qt Automotive Suite

#17

Post by joezydeco »

distances wrote: post #12
lultimouomo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like FUD* - Qt's LGPL is LGPL without modifications, so it does not have any quirk. Is it written in the commercial license that you cannot buy it if you have used the LGPL license? * Not accusing you of course; I'm totally convinced that it can come from a misguided sales rep trying to close a deal as early as possible.

Qt-as-the-company has always made it very clear that you can't switch your Qt LGPL/GPL project to a commercial one if you didn't start with the commercial Qt license from the beginning. You're right, it does sound a bit nasty. No, I haven't read the license myself. It's been brought up multiple times on official Qt blog comments and mailing lists, though. Edit: checked it now, and it's clearly written at https://www.…

It's not standard and it's not pleasant to most ears, but I think over the last 20 (!) years of development the Trolltech guys have tried to make sure they could advance Qt and make a living doing it. I respect that a lot.

OSS was a completely different animal back when this thing started. And it was forward thinking to avoid the whole problem with people demanding free support and bugfixes for open-source code.

Re: Announcing the Qt Automotive Suite

#18

Post by jventura »

ausjke wrote: post #7
karmicthreat wrote: post #3

So I'm remaking a product and was approaching qt about the commercial version. The rep was very insistent that I can not develop an internal prototype using the open source license and then move to the commercial license. So that makes qt pretty unattractive to me since I have to pony up cash and hope it's good. What I would like is something like electron that can run on a frame buffer. What's the current state of t…

Electron might not be "fast" enough for many serious GUI applications? That been said, I also am struggling with finding a non-Java cross-platform GUI dev platform. The selection pool boils down to between QT and Electron indeed these days.

You are correct. The only serious frameworks nowadays are Qt or Electron if you're targeting the cross-platform desktop. There's also wxwidgets, although its python 3 bindings are still being built.

Personally, I'm keeping my eye open on libui (https://github.com/andlabs/libui/) as it is already possible to do some basic things with it. However, it is pretty much in alpha state and I'm slowly writing the Python bindings for it at https://github.com/joaoventura/pylibui/. The thing that I like in the libui is that it is a thin wrapper around platform specific frameworks. Therefore, the library is very small (some 340 KB) and it's as native as the underlying platform calls are..

Regarding Electron, I am writing an application on it, but it is too god damn heavy in terms of memory, disk space and boot time, and web front-end development is absolute chaos these days. Although I'm currently writing my app on it, it is mostly an MVP as I want to make pylibui/libui usable enough to switch to a pure desktop cross-platform library asap..

Re: Announcing the Qt Automotive Suite

#19

Post by distances »

joezydeco wrote: post #17
distances wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qt-as-the-company has always made it very clear that you can't switch your Qt LGPL/GPL project to a commercial one if you didn't start with the commercial Qt license from the beginning. You're right, it does sound a bit nasty. No, I haven't read the license myself. It's been brought up multiple times on official Qt blog comments and mailing lists, though. Edit: checked it now, and it's clearly written at https://www.…

It's not standard and it's not pleasant to most ears, but I think over the last 20 (!) years of development the Trolltech guys have tried to make sure they could advance Qt and make a living doing it. I respect that a lot. OSS was a completely different animal back when this thing started. And it was forward thinking to avoid the whole problem with people demanding free support and bugfixes for open-source code.

Not saying that this is wrong, just that it's no wonder if they think this to be FUD if one isn't familiar with the rule.

As for the reasoning, a customer developing their product for years in-house and switching to commercial just before releasing would definitely place Qt financing in a shaky ground when compared to traditional commercial frameworks.

Re: Announcing the Qt Automotive Suite

#20

Post by joezydeco »

loeg wrote: post #14
joezydeco wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LGPL thing is not really the issue here. It's how Trolltech/Nokia/Digia/QtCo approached the payment of a commercial license. It's always been explained to me by the sales people that "you cannot switch licensing models mid-stream". So if you're planning to go commercial, you start commercial. It's not really about closing the deal as much as making sure the Trolltech developers were paid during the time you neede…

> It's not really about closing the deal as much as making sure the Trolltech developers were paid during the time you needed their support. The OSS license doesn't grant you any support from Trolltech, does it?

Of course not. But I could totally see Trolltech getting critical bugfix requests from people "promising" to pay the commercial license once they launch.

I would totally understand the response eventually turning into "yeah, we'll fix your bug, but put your money where your mouth is", which is where they are today.

Post reply on HN