Licensing: Student in a Company

Aaron_D

Hey there,
I know there are many threads like this, but I guess this is a special case.
I am a student writing my Master Thesis in a company and I would like to use Qt and Qt Creator. It will be a bit more complex GUI, but I will not edit any source code.

After finishing the Thesis, the company will use this GUI in their daily use. They will use the output of this GUI in some presentations for customers, but they will not sell it. This would be 'inhouse use'. Of course, I will convey my work along with the license when I finished my Thesis.
The company allows open source software.

In my opinion, as far as I understood out of the license text, it should be OK using LGPLv3 as long as the company does not sell my work. Please, dont be unkind for this question as I am not too good in english and the license text is quite complicated for me to applicate on my case.

Thank you!

VRonin

LGPLv3 is ok even if they sell the final product. Only certain components use GPLv3 only (QtChart for example) and that license does not allow closed source selling of the product

kshegunov

@VRonin said in Licensing: Student in a Company:

that license does not allow closed source selling of the product

It doesn't? Are you sure?

VRonin

@kshegunov I was referring to GPL. if you link to a GPL licensed library you need your code to be GPL. If you link to LGPL, instead, you are not bound by the license

from https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

Proprietary software developers have the advantage of money; free software developers need to make advantages for each other. Using the ordinary GPL for a library gives free software developers an advantage over proprietary developers: a library that they can use, while proprietary developers cannot use it.

kshegunov

@VRonin said in Licensing: Student in a Company:

I was referring to GPL

Yes, yes. Sorry! I was thinking LGPL, you were talking GPL ... we had ourselves a simple misunderstanding. :)

tekojo

@Aaron_D, and welcome!

Exactly as @VRonin and @kshegunov say above.
LGPL is quite ok for this case (even GPL would be) as you aren't looking at in-house tools.

It's good to ask the question beforehand.