Slow return to pre-Nokia business model? [LWN.net]

Slow return to pre-Nokia business model?

Posted Jan 13, 2016 20:22 UTC (Wed) by Tester (guest, #40675)
Parent article: Qt open source licensing changed

It seems like the Qt Company wants to try to get back some of the licsensing revenue stream that was abandoned when Nokia released it under the LGPL v2.1

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Slow return to pre-Nokia business model?

Posted Jan 13, 2016 20:31 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (4 responses)

You mean, by releasing previously closed-source things under a free software license? While they could also just have kept those things closed source? That doesn't make sense to me...

I'm really happy with this agreement: it offers an enormous broadening of the previous agreements, covering way more platforms, covering the transition to Wayland, opening up previously closed components. I think that both parties have done an admirable job creating this agreement: it's, as far as I know, completely unique.

Slow return to pre-Nokia business model?

Posted Jan 13, 2016 21:29 UTC (Wed) by droundy (guest, #4559) [Link] (3 responses)

I presume the licensing revenue they would gain would be from makers of proprietary software who were able to link with a LGPLv2 library, but are unwilling to link with an LGPLv3 library. Which sounds great to me.

Slow return to pre-Nokia business model?

Posted Jan 13, 2016 23:58 UTC (Wed) by branden (guest, #7029) [Link]

I think of it as a petulance tax.

Slow return to pre-Nokia business model?

Posted Jan 14, 2016 6:24 UTC (Thu) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Yes... Not that you said that, I realize this change might even affect my current customer. They're making a thingy that uses Qt for its embedded gui, and they don't have a commercial license. And it's pretty locked down. But they probably would have had to get one anyway, since they need the QtQuick 2 software renderer (which, btw, performs beautifully on this hardware, the performance is indistinguishable from the QtQuick 1 graphicsview renderer).

Slow return to pre-Nokia business model?

Posted Jan 21, 2016 7:56 UTC (Thu) by gwg (guest, #20811) [Link]

Such closed source manufacturers now have an incentive to fork Qt.