A typical embedded Linux system comprises 250+ software components under 75+ different licenses like BSD, Apache, LGPL, EPL and GPL. You must satisfy the license obligations for all components and ensure that license combinations are legal and desirable. A special focus is on using Qt under LGPL and on avoiding the hefty fees for commercial Qt licenses on embedded systems.
The Yocto recipe gives GPL as the license of MariaDB. The Qt Sql library implements its MySQL driver with MariaDB. Hence, it would be under GPL - and so would be all applications linking Qt Sql. Businesses would have to open-source their code. A disaster! So, what's wrong?
Episode 55: Better Built By Burkhard
Episode 48: Better Built By Burkhard. For user products, LGPL-3.0 grants users the right to install modified software on the device. For business products, it does not. This makes the choice between Qt LGPL and Qt Commercial for OEMs of machines, measurement instruments or medical devices obvious.
Illegal License Combinations
Most embedded Qt HMIs don't need the expensive commercial license but can be built with the free LGPL-3.0. Static linking is allowed with LGPL. B2B products need not allow the installation of modified Qt libs. Some Qt modules can be used under GPL albeit in separate processes.
Do You Have to Pay for Qt?
Welcome to Episode 26 of My Newsletter on Qt Embedded Systems Last week, I gave my second interview to investors on Qt in Automotive. The biggest fear of the investors in both interviews was that the value gap between Qt
From Qt 5.15, The Qt Company make their offering a bit more inconvenient for FOSS users. They announced three changes: * A Qt account is mandatory to download binary Qt packages. The offline installer is not available to FOSS users
The little known KDE Free Qt Foundation makes sure that Qt stays free and open-source. It guarantees that all Qt modules currently licensed under LGPLv3 must continue to be available under LGPLv3 in the future. This covers all modules from
At Qt Day 2019 in Florence, Italy, I gave a talk Using Qt under LGPLv3. In the first part The obligations of Qt LGPLv3: made understandable, I explain in detail, how you must provide the source code, the license texts,