Qt offering changes 2020

Posted Jan 27, 2020 23:45 UTC (Mon) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644)
In reply to: Qt offering changes 2020 by bovinespirit
Parent article: Qt offering changes 2020

The code is still GPL/LGPL so you can distribute binaries all you like as long as you distribute the sources as well.

Yes, you can redistribute all the binaries you have received under the GPL (as long as you adhere to the other license requirements....) But, Qt either holds the copyrights for the parts they wrote, or have made external contributors agree to the Qt Contribution Agreement (source) for their parts, which states in §3.1:

Licensor hereby grants [...] to The Qt Company a sublicensable, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free and fully paid-up copyright and trade secret license to [...] make available and distribute Licensor Contribution(s) and any derivative works thereof under license terms of The Qt Company’s choosing including any Open Source Software license.

(emphasis mine) So while the current source is currently available under the GPL, the binaries redistributed from Qt's website to people with Qt accounts might not be, and future versions of the source code made available by Qt could be under any other license terms that Qt feels like releasing under - and possibly only those other terms that Qt feels like releasing under.

Qt offering changes 2020

Posted Jan 28, 2020 0:12 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (3 responses)

> So while the current source is currently available under the GPL, the binaries redistributed from Qt's website to people with Qt accounts might not be, and future versions of the source code made available by Qt could be under any other license terms that Qt feels like releasing under - and possibly only those other terms that Qt feels like releasing under.

Any other license will have to be limited to 12 months according to https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php

Qt offering changes 2020

Posted Jan 28, 2020 1:08 UTC (Tue) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (2 responses)

That's... less reassuring than it sounds. 12 months is a long time to wait for a (hypothetical) security patch...

Qt offering changes 2020

Posted Jan 28, 2020 2:56 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> That's... less reassuring than it sounds. 12 months is a long time to wait for a (hypothetical) security patch...

My impression from the post is that all patches go into the non LTS version first. If they mark security patches as such, long term distributions can handle backporting

Qt offering changes 2020

Posted Jan 28, 2020 13:41 UTC (Tue) by lisandropm (subscriber, #69317) [Link]

Security patchs will certainly be provided. And normally backporting them tends to be easy.