Qt licensing questions

Matthias Ettrich ettrich at trolltech.com
Mon Jun 9 14:21:38 BST 2003


On Saturday 07 June 2003 22:44, Scott Wheeler wrote:
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> On Saturday 07 June 2003 21:43, Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > it seems the mailing list kde-licensing at kde.org doesn't exist anymore
> > (http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-licensing), so I don't know
> > better than posting it here.
> >
> > Well, I have some questions regarding the GPL/QPL versions of Qt, so here
> > we go.
>
> Well, I'll give them a go, being something of a licensing pedant, but keep
> in mind that my advice has absolutely no real legal bearing.  :-)

Alexander, you really do want to talk to sales at trolltech.com. There is (among 
others) at least one thing Scott is overlooking, and that is the Qt 
Commercial License agreement you will need for your closed source application 
the very moment you start distributing it to somebody else.

This agreement covers code you develop with a Qt professional or enterprise 
edition. it explicitly does not cover code that you developed with any of 
Trolltech's free edition prior to purchasing a license, unless you make this 
code available to the general public under the terms of the GNU GPL.

In other words: you may not have a GNU GPL problem, but you still may not be 
able to release the software as closed source later.

If your problem is that you simply cannot  afford the licenses today, talk to 
sales at trolltech.com as well. They have a program for startup companies.

Matthias




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