Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 20th Oct 2010 22:22 UTC, submitted by vivainio
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what part of "what's gonna be the license of the next version" you didn't get?
The next version AFAIK will also be LGPL v3, but what does it matter since the current version (Qt 4.7) is LGPL v3?
If Nokia withdraw subsequent version of Qt as no longer GPLv3, (which would be suicide BTW for Nokia's involvement in Qt), then the community would simply fork Qt 4.7 and move on.
While Nokia continue to keep Qt as GPL, then the community will continue to support them.
Right now, Nokia enjoys considerable support, help and contribution from the community.
Edited 2010-10-21 01:42 UTC
what part of "what's gonna be the license of the next version" you didn't get?
every, i mean every open source project does have somebody in charge that controls it and make decisions that others could not like, that's life.
yes, it's possible some day they could decide to close it up or cease the development, trascuring for a moment that would be a suicide and is really unlikely, let's assume for a moment that it happens. Now, they can't *legally* change retroactively the license of already released versions, more than that, the KDE free Qt foundation makes sure with a legally binding agreement that all they did put in qt until that moment is released under an acceptable license.
So what would happen would be that the development would be made move forward by individuals (and there are maaany people around that know the internals enough), and yes it would suck, yes, it would slow down, but would just become like many other open source projects at the moment
now, all of this won't happen, because Qt is making great progress towards open governance. And i mean not only accepting patches like now, but even opening up some of the *decision making* processes to both individuals and different companies. This among other things ensures that as many people as possible (and with different interests) have a say in it, ensuring that
a) doesn't go in a direction that favors only one use (or company)
b) relicensing become a lot harder
Obviously you don't get it.
Nokia accepts outside contributions and does not even ask to assign the copyright, thus if they changed the license later on all outside contributions would need to be removed.
And in fact it is the main contributor who sets the priorities, but that is the same for ANY FOSS project, be it Qt or Nokia. Further looking at gitourious you can see that also merge requests for features are accpeted.





Member since:
2007-02-17
Qt is licensed as LGPL v3 (not just GPL, mind you, but LGPL), which makes it decidedly not proprietary.
BTW, it was Nokia who made it LGPL. Qt wasn't LGPL before Nokia purchased it.
Being LGPL means that you can statically link it, and then distribute it as a binary if you like. MythTV comes to mind here.
Qt is being embraced by Intel within the Meego framework.