Redistribution of LGPL licensed SDK (such as Qt 4.6.x)

Question

Hello everyone,

I was wondering if under the LGPL(v2.1) one could re-distribute a complete pre-compiled SDK that is linked to dynamically in my own project?

Background: Qt is licensed under LGPL and many applications I develop are linking with it. More recently we created our own SDK that uses Qt. Now, other people may extend and write plugins for this SDK and use Qt in those themselves. To avoid any computability issues I would like to provide them with a pre-build version of Qt, just like the one provided by nokia - only that I would use my separate compiler version & settings and also build it for 64 bit, which is not provided on the nokia website at all.

The remaining question is - if there are NO modifications to the Qt source - can I re-distribute a compiled "SDK-version" without issues as Qt is released under LGPL?

Of course distributing the DLL files shouldn't be a problem, but what about the header files and the libs ?

Thank you!

Answer 1

For now it may be easiest to give build instructions to the people, who also want to use Qt to develop their own plugins for an SDK that already links with Qt and restrict the usage to a specific version with some specific build-keys. I haven't found too much information on this specific topic. Here are some slides provided by Nokia (Qt), though:

http://blog.qt.nokia.com/2009/11/30/qt-making-the-right-licensing-decision/

Not a very clear answer, but to be save I wouldn't redistribute the lib & header files and rather give a script that helps others to build Qt the way you did.