Building Drones and Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles with QGroundControl and Qt

QGroundControl (QGC), the leading open source ground control station for uncrewed aerial vehicles, is built on Qt.

Learn what modules it leverages, what its licensing requires, and how to build compliant proprietary products on QGC and Qt.

Building a proprietary application on QGroundControl requires a commercial Qt license. Without one, GPL v3 applies to the software and the complete source code must be shared.

Qt and QGroundControl

QGroundControl (QGC) is the leading open-source ground control station for uncrewed vehicles, providing flight control and mission planning for any vehicle running the MAVLink protocol—including PX4 and ArduPilot autopilots—across air, ground, and water autonomous systems. It is governed by the Dronecode Foundation, a vendor-neutral non-profit that also stewards PX4, MAVLink, and MAVSDK, and is used by hobbyists, researchers, and commercial operators alike.

By building on Qt as its core cross-platform framework, QGC inherits the ability to run on all major desktop, mobile, and embedded platforms from a single codebase.

Qt Framework's modules playing a foundational role in QGC and drone technology include:

QML	All flight instruments, maps, camera feeds, and settings dialogs.
Qt Network	TCP/UDP MAVLink links, serial connections, USB, Bluetooth via Qt network abstraction.
Qt Location	Mission planning maps, geofence overlays, and vehicle position tracking.
Qt Multimedia	GStreamer integration for live video feeds from drone cameras.
Qt Quick 3D	Hardware-accelerated 3D scene for the terrain / building viewer and 3D flight visualisation.

QGroundControl and Qt Open Source Licensing

QGroundControl is dual-licensed under either Apache 2.0 (permissive) or GPL v3 (copyleft). Largely built on Qt, QGC inherits GPL conditions from Qt modules that open source users may use only under GPL, not the more permissive LGPL—among others Qt Graphs, Qt HTTP Server, and Qt Quick 3D.

As a strong copyleft license, GPL forces any product derived from the QGC codebase to inherit the GPL terms.

When developing software under GPL v3, two obligations follow:

The source code must be made available to everyone receiving the software.

The software cannot be locked to specific hardware.

The commercial Qt license lifts both these conditions.

NOTE: Using GPL software in commercial projects is possible, but the resulting product cannot be kept proprietary. To avoid legal and financial consequences, organizations should review their open source policy and verify compliance with GPL's obligations through internal legal review.

Commercial Use of QGroundControl

GPL v3 is a legitimate choice for developing code under the principles of free software, where the resulting source code is shared with the community.

IMPORTANT: Commercial licenses are required for building proprietary applications whose source code is not intended to be disclosed.

As underlined in QGC License Information, there are two permissible combinations of QGC and Qt.

Feature / Aspect	Open-Source Path	Commercial Path
QGroundControl	GPL v3	Apache 2.0
Qt Framework	Open source (GPL v3)	Commercial Qt
Best for	Community, research	Products, contractors
Core obligation	Full copyleft	Commercial terms
Proprietary code	To be published	Proprietary
Hardware lockdown	Not permitted	Permitted

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