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On Qt Modules and Tools for Designers and Developers if I choose LGPL then under Development Tools I see QtCreator is disabled.

And

LGPL v3: With LGPLv3 license option you can use the essential libraries and some add-on libraries of Qt. LGPLv3 allows for keeping your application source code closed as long as all the requirements of LGPLv3 are met.

Should I conclude I'm allowed to use QtCreator while working for a company, if I'm using LGPL?

Keeping the application source code closed is mandatory in the project I'm working.

I'm an employee of the company. AFAIK company wants to sell the resulting software product, keeping application source code closed. I'm simply linking to the Qt libraries, not modifying them and recompiling.

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  • Are you an employee of the company, or a contractor? What does the company want to be able to do with the resulting product? Are you simply linking in the Qt libraries, or are you taking code from them or modifying them? There are too many undefined issues here to give a specific answer.
    – MadHatter ♦
    May 7, 2022 at 13:21
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    I see you have asked a group of nearly-identical questions, others of which answer the issue I've raised above. Asking lots of questions in a single posting is frowned upon, but the way to get around that is not to write lots of individual tightly-coupled questions. I'm going to close all the others as duplicates of this one, and I urge you to work out what you want answered first, and modify this question to ask it. If other questions flow from the answers to the first, you can (and should) ask them at that time, assuming they've not already been answered elsewhere here.
    – MadHatter ♦
    May 7, 2022 at 13:28
  • Sure, I understand your point, sorry for that. Updated the question with answers to your previous comment.
    – KcFnMi
    May 8, 2022 at 4:42

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Considering only free licences, the core Qt libraries are available under LGPLv3. You can link those into a binary which is distributed under a proprietary licence, though there are some fairly-onerous conditions that we detail in other posts here.

QtCreator is only distributed under GPLv3, but it's an IDE, and it's generally understood that the licence on a piece of software doesn't extend to covering its output. Were that to hold in this case, your use of QtCreator to make your binary would have no licence implications for the binary. But some programming tools copy parts of themselves into their outputs, and in those cases, if there are no specific exemptions in the IDE's licence, a GPLv3 IDE would require a GPLv3 binary. You will need to determine if this affects QtCreator.

The alternative is to pay Qt for the commercial licence which allows you to do what you want without having to worry about this whole issue.

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