License documentation
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Some customers require documentation about used OSS software and many of the 3rd-party software inside Qt requires to be mentioned within the software or its documentation, for example all BSD-licenses. I use a commercial Qt license, therefore I do not need to mention the use of Qt, but still all of the 3rd-party components within.
I think it is a nightmare to assemble this information again for each version of Qt which takes several hours now. It had been one two pages for earlier versions, but now it is separated for each component.
How do you handle that? Do you just ignore the 3rd-party license? Give a link to the Qt website? Or assemble the information for each version?
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Some customers require documentation about used OSS software and many of the 3rd-party software inside Qt requires to be mentioned within the software or its documentation, for example all BSD-licenses. I use a commercial Qt license, therefore I do not need to mention the use of Qt, but still all of the 3rd-party components within.
I think it is a nightmare to assemble this information again for each version of Qt which takes several hours now. It had been one two pages for earlier versions, but now it is separated for each component.
How do you handle that? Do you just ignore the 3rd-party license? Give a link to the Qt website? Or assemble the information for each version?
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The same issue with 3rd-party licenses also applies to users of the LGPL version.
I seems that most Qt users just ignore it. I had been asking a laywer what needs to be done and that resulted in a >40 pages document regarding Qt only.Qt support just told that they don't have something else than the information on the website. The also told that the use of Qt does not need to be mentioned in case of a commercial license, but that this does not apply to the 3rd-party licenses within Qt.
Qt sales told that they would provide something when available, but nothing is currently available. -
Since Qt 5.8, there has been a standard way of documenting 3rd-party licenses in Qt: http://code.qt.io/cgit/meta/quips.git/tree/quip-0007.rst
These qt_attribution.json files are located within the 3rdparty subfolders of the Qt source code. Currently, it doesn't look like they are available in the binaries packages.
One possible solution is to create a tool that searches for these qt_attribution.json files, extract the license information, and auto-generate the documentation in the format you want.
@MarkusR said in License documentation:
I think it is a nightmare to assemble this information again for each version of Qt which takes several hours now. It had been one two pages for earlier versions, but now it is separated for each component.
If I remember correctly, the "one two pages" was simply created by copying+pasting all the separate LICENSE files into one giant .txt file. This can be automated too.
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Thanks for the reference to the qt_attribution.json files. Not only the files under 3rdparty are needed, but the whole source tree needs to be searched.
For 5.10 I meanwhile generated the documentation manually, but will try to use these json files in case the Qt company does not come with a better solution. -
Thanks for the reference to the qt_attribution.json files. Not only the files under 3rdparty are needed, but the whole source tree needs to be searched.
For 5.10 I meanwhile generated the documentation manually, but will try to use these json files in case the Qt company does not come with a better solution.@MarkusR
It seems a shame that the Qt Company for a paid commercial subscription is not prepared to make the effort to provide users with the necessary file/data, and simply says "would provide something when available, but nothing is currently available", as we all know what that means....
