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

Slow return to pre-Nokia business model?

Posted Jan 13, 2016 20:31 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185)
In reply to: Slow return to pre-Nokia business model? by Tester
Parent article: Qt open source licensing changed

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.

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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.