You won't get any support of the "big money" unless the library is at least LGPL so it can be used in closed source applications. GPL is primarily for the idealists, not for business.
Just look at other essetial, widely used frameworks like OpenCV, Skia, Chromium, LibreOffice, just to name a few. In each such open source project a couple of companies are involved who can affort to dedicate a couple of developers to work on the open source frameworks they're using but which are not their income. This is a "coopetition" among companies and everyone benefits from it. In the case of Qt it's restricted because The Company sells licences of work which was done by others (companies and private people) for free.
> In the case of Qt it's restricted because The Company sells licences of work done by others for free
No, using the LGPL code done by third party is still free of charge.
> This is a "coopetition" among companies and everyone benefits from it.
And we also have seen many times developers who released their code as MIT never seeing a dime from these big companies (such as Corejs developer).
LGPL is the way to go to ensure that big corps who make money out of an open source project do pay up. You don't want to release your source code? Then pay for a commercial license, end of story.
> You won't get any support of the "big money" unless the library is at least LGPL so it can be used in closed source applications. GPL is primarily for the idealists, not for business.
Right, of course; hence the failure of Linux and the dominance of the BSD family. /s
I wouldn't say that game consoles use FreeBSD so much as that they use chunks of code from BSD; I mean, the Switch is apparently using a microkernel, so I doubt that it's all that close.
But yes, using permissively-licensed components absolutely is* a good thing, including for the users, who get higher-quality software with less dev time and lower cost of development. Obviously I'd prefer that it was all GPLv3, but given that the alternative in practice is probably fully-proprietary software from scratch, I think BSD is better than nothing.
Using the product while making a closed source application and contributing nothing (money or patches) back can hardly be construed as promoting open source. The "big money" that won't play ball is why they instead have the commercial licensing options.
Nobody claims that. The problem today is that The Company only contributes a fraction to the maintenance and sells licences which includes work done by others. That's a pain point, isn't it?
I don't believe that is the real pain point. The Company could resolve it easily by paying contributors in exchange for signing the CLA. What is more likely is that they can't afford to do this.
That would be much too complicated. Just imagine such a model with OpenCV or some of the other big C++ frameworks. Selling framework licenses is just an outdated business model. It would make more sense to release the Qt framework under BSD and make money with add-on services (as other companies actually do successfully).
It doesn't seem that things being "much too complicated" is the issue when maintaining separate proprietary and open source forks is on the table. Although it's unclear if it actually is or not.
OpenCV (and many other open source frameworks) never had a CLA so this wouldn't be an issue for that. In my opinion there is nothing inherently wrong with dual-licensing but it's expensive and many companies do not have the resources to pull it off correctly. Re-releasing under the BSD license appears to be the backup plan if the Qt Company ever goes belly-up.
> In my opinion there is nothing inherently wrong with dual-licensing
It significantly hampers cooperation. No company in its right mind would make a large investment for free in the development of software sold by another company. Without this unspeakable dual license, a balance is possible, i.e. the companies can invest and use without taking inadequat advantage of each other.
It doesn't have to be "for free". There is a simple solution I already mentioned, which is for the maintaining company to pay in exchange for getting the CLA signed. Serious long-term contributors should have this negotiation before making any large investment. Businesses can ask for royalties up to a cap, individual contributors are likely to get a salaried offer made up-front.
In the event of total failure of Qt's business model and reversion to a BSD license it is also very likely that there will not be much left of a market for big enterprise services around this type of product, so be careful with that double-edged sword. You might just end up with more fragmentation and internal proprietary forks to contend with. On the other hand, independent consulting will always remain an option as it is now.
