Re: Qt becomes Free Software

[Gleef <dzol virtual-yellow com>]

On Wed, 18 Nov 1998, David Warnock wrote:

> ** Reply to message from James Smith <j-smith@physics.tamu.edu> on Wed, 18 Nov
> 1998 07:03:46 -0600
> 
> 
> > Unfortunately, it's equivalent to the GPL (in general), not the LGPL. 
> > Maybe I don't understand how Qt works, but I assume users can have
> > dynamic linking with their libraries.  If you read section 6 of their
> > license, you see that any program linking with Qt must be open sourced. 
> > There goes any commercial support, which IMHO would be nice.
> > 
> > Section 5 says we can run the non-open source programs, we just can't
> > develope them.  This is more restrictive than any GPL or LGPL.
> 
> Hang on a minute.
> 
> 1.  The complaint has been about the QT license and KDE. That is definately
> solved.

Not really, the QPL has the same legal barriers to having GPL programs
linked to it as before.  That is to say, you cannot distribute a binary
GPL program linked to a QPL library.  QPL is now Open Source, but not
GPL-compatible, so KDE still has the licensing problem.


> 2. If you want to develop commercial software then you can buy QT Professional
> to do so and that will be 100% compatible with QT free. So QT is now suitable
> for free software without stopping the company selling QT for co,mmercial
> software. This seems perfectly fair to me.

Yup, Cygnus does the same thing with its Cygwin32 library.  You can get it
under the GPL, but if you want to do proprietary things with it, you have
to pay for the commercial license.


> The only thing that might upset some people is that if they develop patches for
> QT free then TrollTech can make money by selling them with QT professional.  I
> do not have a problem with this but then I am not like to make any such patches.

I'm still upset that they explicitly recommend programs do the broken GPL
linking.  If they dump that then I will happily welcome TrollTech into the
Open Source world.


-Gleef