Aren’t open source and commercial licensing total opposites?
Juhapekka Niemi: Commercial and open source software work in a symbiotic manner where both benefit from a large ecosystem of commercial and community developers as well as support from a large company. All work together to ultimately provide a full-performing and stable development framework.
The Qt application development framework is distributed under a commercial licence from Digia or under the terms of the GNU open source licensing through the Qt Project.
The licensing terms are quite different, and provide different value. A lot of companies do not want, or cannot, work through the limitations set by the open source licence agreement, or they feel they do not want to take additional risks and choose the commercial licence for peace of mind.
The open source licence, as the name says, is still a software licence and therefore any company using it must understand the terms and work according to them.