Qt is lovely but the company that controls it is in a bad place financially and it's not clear what will become of Qt if they go under. There's also the issue where if you get a commercial Qt license it's much more difficult to contribute to Qt under GPL or LGPL. And of course the license is tremendously expensive unless you're making serious money with the application, so prohibitive to smaller companies. I love Qt but I would never feel comfortable using it in a commercial project. There was also this bullshit earlier this year where they tried to pressure KDE into worse terms https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.h...
> Qt is lovely but the company that controls it is in a bad place financially and it's not clear what will become of Qt if they go under.
this part has always been clear:
"Should The Qt Company discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition under the required licenses, then the Foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license or under other open source licenses. The agreements stay valid in case of a buy-out, a merger or bankruptcy."
Yep, but a hostile entity that owns Qt can do a lot of damage to Qt by publishing on the last permitted day, and denying community contributions and destroying community governance. I can definitely imagine a hostile corporation like Oracle doing so (and they have form).
Qt is still available as GPL. Even if the Qt company goes under today and nobody picks up development, it's stil a great package for many years to come.
I agree behavior lately is not great, and a Qt company in trouble won't be good, but I think the community will pick up quite a bit if it comes to that.
I also think many misunderstand or misrepresent the implications of a GPL only Qt (for closed source applications). It's a matter of linking correctly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23321448
Right, of course it is, but if the Qt company goes under the highest risk is that its assets get purchased by a hostile entity, which releases everything with a year's delay and doesn't allow community governance/contributions. Imagine Qt owned by Oracle and you'll understand my concern. Of course if that happens KDE and the other current Qt users will likely fork it, but someone like Oracle can do a shitton of damage to the community in the process by threatening litigation.
The issue with the commercial licensing is that if you are a commercial licensee you are contractually prevented from contributing to Qt in some ways. See https://www.qt.io/terms-conditions/ and search for "Prohibited combination". If you are able to comply with the GPL or LGPL components without becoming a licensee, this is better in every way (you get to contribute, you have much more legal safety if the company gets acquired by a hostile entity, you don't have to worry about what happens when your license expires, and of course you save money). So those license terms are actively preventing the Qt company from getting revenue, because you get a worse deal in most ways if you pay them than if you don't. This is why I'm uncomfortable with Qt in non-GPL/LGPL commercial projects. You get trapped and you can't relicense your project to GPL afterwards even if you want to.
I really dont get why people still throw FUD with this argument. It's been what, 25 years already since this argument lead to the KDE Free Qt agreement?
At this point the biggest concern for the Trolls (or whoever owns Qt nowadays now) should be that the FUD against GPL is starting to slowly evaporate, so even big companies are starting to use GPLd Qt rather than pay licenses. By the time they go Oracle there will not be much they can do.
