Licensing question
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A licensing question (no idea if this is the most appropriate forum, but it seems to have had licensing-related questions in the past).
I'm a one-man band (call me 'A') who's been subscribed to a "Qt for Small Business" license (think it was "Qt for Startups" originally) since around 2015. (I make "hobbyist" amounts of money per year.)
There's another company ('B') asking me to do a bit of maintenance on an old Qt iOS app (originally developed under a "Qt for Application Development" license they had - now expired - up to Qt 5.7. They have no other or current Qt license).
The nature of the "maintenance" has basically been to rebuild it against 5.15.15... and that's all that was needed. (Not really relevant to the question, but it seems iOS 16 introduced something which caused the Qt app - or something in the Qt graphics stack - to get confused about screen size and orientation... attaching xcode showed some startup log messages warning that some screen related-stuff wasn't being called from the main thread. Didn't investigate further as the update to 5.15.15 was reasonably straightforward and fixed the issue).
However they're now asking me to upload the fixed version to the Appstore Connect area of another company 'C' who this app was originally developed for. Looking around there, 'C' seems to have a bunch of apps developed by various 3rd parties (I don't think any of them are Qt-based though) and having various folks uploading apps to company C's area on the appstore is just their normal way of doing things.
FWIW none of these are pay-for apps. More "educational/promotional" "e-book" sorts of efforts.
My question is: is it at all reasonable/legal for me to do that (upload this fixed iOS app) under the terms of my "Qt for Small Business" license?
The app is pretty old/obsolete (but still much slicker than the website that was apparently supposed to replace it - go OpenGL/QSG+native code!!!, especially on modern HW!) I have raised the issue with 'B' and 'C' of alternatively open-sourcing it if closed-source commercial licensing is a closed route and they seemed to be quite receptive (although there's a fair amount of "content" - text and images - baked in there and I'm not sure any of us have yet considered what the copyright implications of open-sourcing the app might be for that).
Thanks for any help/pointers.
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Hi,
WARNING: I am not a lawyer.
AFAIK, if they need "commercial grade" support as in LTS versions of Qt, they should get a license for you to work on their software. On a side note, the Qt for Small Business rules have changed (just announced during the Qt World Summit) which makes it accessible to way more small businesses.
As for open sourcing their code, depending on how the assets are managed, they could be decoupled from the code base and only used when building the application on their CI for example.
Interested in AI ? www.idiap.ch
Please read the Qt Code of Conduct - https://forum.qt.io/topic/113070/qt-code-of-conduct -
Hi,
WARNING: I am not a lawyer.
AFAIK, if they need "commercial grade" support as in LTS versions of Qt, they should get a license for you to work on their software. On a side note, the Qt for Small Business rules have changed (just announced during the Qt World Summit) which makes it accessible to way more small businesses.
As for open sourcing their code, depending on how the assets are managed, they could be decoupled from the code base and only used when building the application on their CI for example.
Any info on what the "Qt for Small Business" rules changes were and whether the info at https://www.qt.io/pricing/qt-for-small-business has been updated? Companies "B" and "C" in my case are over the "annual revenue + funding of max $250 000" eligibility threshold (while I am way way under that!)
Looking at "proper license" pricing... https://www.qt.io/pricing . Well I suspect some folks will say "can't we just pay for a month, get the fresh fixed build uploaded to appstore, job done, cancel license". However I'm pretty sure there's license terms about you're supposed to have the license for the entire period the app has been under development - precisely to stop such gaming attempts - and this app arguably goes back years, even if it has basically been dormant more recently.
Think I need to go and actually read some license text (Ugh... I am not a lawyer either and my eyes glaze over after a few paragraphs). Think the key thing I need to understand is - if the license question is largely about who can distribute what - if I upload an app to company "C"'s appstore area (for download to iOS devices), am I "distributing" the app, or is company C? (Another option might be for me to put it up on the appstore under my own individual iOS developer account name... but I can't see company C going for that.)
Re the open-source route: The app bakes all its content into .qrc files and has quite a clean separation between "content" (e-book pages, text, images, videos, data for interactive widgets) and "resources" (app logic, page templates and furniture). I think what I need to understand better is if we put up an app and say "hey it's open source... here's the git repo", whether there has to be enough there to rebuild the exact same app, or just enough someone could build it with some minimal "dummy content" until they'd fleshed it out with their own stuff.
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Any info on what the "Qt for Small Business" rules changes were and whether the info at https://www.qt.io/pricing/qt-for-small-business has been updated? Companies "B" and "C" in my case are over the "annual revenue + funding of max $250 000" eligibility threshold (while I am way way under that!)
Looking at "proper license" pricing... https://www.qt.io/pricing . Well I suspect some folks will say "can't we just pay for a month, get the fresh fixed build uploaded to appstore, job done, cancel license". However I'm pretty sure there's license terms about you're supposed to have the license for the entire period the app has been under development - precisely to stop such gaming attempts - and this app arguably goes back years, even if it has basically been dormant more recently.
Think I need to go and actually read some license text (Ugh... I am not a lawyer either and my eyes glaze over after a few paragraphs). Think the key thing I need to understand is - if the license question is largely about who can distribute what - if I upload an app to company "C"'s appstore area (for download to iOS devices), am I "distributing" the app, or is company C? (Another option might be for me to put it up on the appstore under my own individual iOS developer account name... but I can't see company C going for that.)
Re the open-source route: The app bakes all its content into .qrc files and has quite a clean separation between "content" (e-book pages, text, images, videos, data for interactive widgets) and "resources" (app logic, page templates and furniture). I think what I need to understand better is if we put up an app and say "hey it's open source... here's the git repo", whether there has to be enough there to rebuild the exact same app, or just enough someone could build it with some minimal "dummy content" until they'd fleshed it out with their own stuff.
Sorry, I don't remember exactly when the new terms will be in effect. It might be starting next year.
You can also contact the Qt Company for more information about the handling of the licence for third party development.
As for the separation of dataset and code, it could be done for example using a submodule accessible only for the company builds or to be even more separated, the build script could clone the assets as part of the build process.
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Hmmm... having had a good plough through the
Licenses/QT-ENTERPRISE-LICENSE-AGREEMENT(4.4.1) I found in my~/Qtfolder (where the MaintenanceTool and all the stuff it downloads lives)......Well I'm actually a bit surprised how little it has to say about "distribution" of software (once you've ignored all the stuff about devices and per-device licensing anyway). The key section seems to be 3.2 Distribution of Applications, which is only 15 lines long. And the key bit there seems to be the granting of the right to
distribute, by itself or through its Contractors, Redistributables as installed, incorporated or integrated into Applications for execution on the Deployment Platforms
That must include uploading an app to the Apple appstore ('cos there's nothing else in the document I can see that'd seem to be relevant to that case) - and the license's definition of "Contractors" seems to include the notion of "distributors" and service providers - well I can't see anything there that's being fussy about where on the appstore the app goes and who's collection of apps it appears in, so I'm going to go with thinking I'm OK to push this fixed app build out licensed under my Qt for Small Business license (unless someone can tell me I'm completely wrong in the next few hours...)
