

Qt 4.5 will be released under the LGPL - icefox
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090114-nokia-qt-lgpl-switch-huge-win-for-cross-platform-development.html

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Dauntless
This is awesome. The major disadvantage of using Qt was the huge price for a
license if you didn't make opensource software. Now that they took that away I
guess I will never look back to GTK or wxWidgets. Thank you a million times
Nokia.

~~~
jcl
Agreed. The Qt commercial licensing was unusual in that you had to buy it
before you started coding -- any code written against the free version could
never be commercially distributed, even if you later bought a commercial Qt
license.

I'd been avoiding Qt precisely for this reason; I didn't want to pay for a
license for experimentation, but I also didn't want to restrict my options in
the unlikely case that the experimentation turned into something worthwhile.

I notice they are _adding_ LGPL to the list of licensing options... Why would
anyone continue to choose the commercial licensing option when an LGPL one is
available?

~~~
bad_user
The commercial licensing still has value, because LGPL has the same
restrictions as GPL, minus the clause that states that you can't combine GPL
with licenses that have more restrictions that it.

For example, it must be possible for customers to link your application to
newer versions of the LGPL licensed library. And any modifications you make to
the library itself must be also licensed under LGPL or compatible.

~~~
jcl
In that case, they _really_ need to change their commercial licensing model.
It may be hard for a hobbyist to tell if they'll need a commercial license
ahead of time, but it will be even harder for a commercial company to tell if
they'll eventually need an LGPL exception.

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wheels
This is exciting for us too. Our engine uses some small parts of Qt, but we'd
intentionally kept the usage somewhat limited in case we ever wanted to factor
it out so that we could deliver our stuff in some form other than as a web
service. It's nice having that out of the way.

I'd also had a chance to chat with some of the Trolls before the news broke
since my initial reaction was, "What does this say about Nokia's future
commitment to Qt?" I'd guessed that Nokia would do free-as-in-beer licensing,
but not free-as-in-our-competitors-can-fork-it licensing. Turns out that there
are some reasonably sane business reasons for the switch.

It'll be interesting to see how Nokia plays their cards in the just heating up
mobile platform wars and how Qt factors into that.

------
icefox
Official press release: [http://www.qtsoftware.com/about/news/lgpl-license-
option-add...](http://www.qtsoftware.com/about/news/lgpl-license-option-added-
to-qt)

Some of my own thoughts on it: [http://benjamin-
meyer.blogspot.com/2009/01/qt-45-will-be-rel...](http://benjamin-
meyer.blogspot.com/2009/01/qt-45-will-be-released-under-lgpl.html)

dot.kde.org article: <http://dot.kde.org/1231920504/>

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nailer
With the recent (well, last few years) advancements on GTK for WIndows I've
been looking at PyGTK as a cross-platform, native looking GUI option.

Time to check out PyQT.

~~~
acangiano
> Time to check out PyQT.

Not so fast. The Python bindings are still licensed under GPL (and a
commercial license) by Riverbank.

~~~
radicand
Creating Python bindings to Qt is a lot of work, to be sure, but it's not
rocket science. Either Riverbank will LGPL PyQt, or someone else will no doubt
come along and write their own LGPL bindings.

Either way, this is big news. In general, there has been a lot of hang-
wringing about "which GUI toolkit to use", and the main (and pretty much only)
reason for not using Qt (its licensing) has just evaporated into thin air.

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hermitcrab
BTW here is my take on it as a current Qt commercial licence owner:
[http://successfulsoftware.net/2009/01/14/qt-to-be-
available-...](http://successfulsoftware.net/2009/01/14/qt-to-be-available-
for-free-under-lgpl/)

------
dhotson
Nice.. this will be a big win for writing commercial linux apps.

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jakozaur
One of the best GUI toolkit ever. Now available for free almost without any
restrictions.

I hope it will encourage developers to create multi-platform applications.
Don't forget that desktop programs are in many cases much more useful then
their web based competitors.

