Open Source license question
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Hi all,
I'm looking into using QT to develop an application but I'm not sure that I will comply with all the Open Source obligations. My situation is as follows:
I have a vendor in China that will ship some custom touchscreen devices to me. I will then be selling these devices to customers. The devices will be running Debian and I will be installing my QT application onto them. I can open source all of my application code but I do not think I can get the vendor to open source their Debian disk image or anything they are in control of.
Would this put me at odds with GPL and LGPL? Apologies if these are obvious questions, I've not dealt with OSS and licensing in this way before.
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Hi and welcome to devnet,
WARNING: I am not a lawyer.
AFAIK, the fact that you are using GPL/LGPL for your application does not impact the OS on your target system.
In any case, contact someone who has expertise in this domain. -
Hi all,
I'm looking into using QT to develop an application but I'm not sure that I will comply with all the Open Source obligations. My situation is as follows:
I have a vendor in China that will ship some custom touchscreen devices to me. I will then be selling these devices to customers. The devices will be running Debian and I will be installing my QT application onto them. I can open source all of my application code but I do not think I can get the vendor to open source their Debian disk image or anything they are in control of.
Would this put me at odds with GPL and LGPL? Apologies if these are obvious questions, I've not dealt with OSS and licensing in this way before.
@hipgrave said in Open Source license question:
or anything they are in control of.
I am also NOT a lawyer, but that half sentence might be a problem, since I don't fully understand what you want to say with it. It might be the problem if you mean that you need to add that into YOUR source. So if you got source from them to control the display and you need to add THEIR source into your source.
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Hi @hipgrave,
I'm also not a lawyer, but even your China manufacturer has to respect the GPL. Furthermore, if you sell these devices outside China you may be in charge for license violations.
So, IMO, you should of course get all the sources from the vendor and provice the sources to anyone requesting them.
Regards
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Also not a lawyer here.
Your obligation is to comply with LGPL.
That means- your app has to be linked dynamically to Qt (not static)
- you have to include a license note saying explicitly that you are using Qt under LGPL
- users must be able to replace the Qt version with another, without any restrictions (no hardware / software tricks to put a stick in the wheel).
