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Re: Trolltech: No-Charge License for Qt/Windows
by Vedran Rodic on Wednesday 27/Jun/2001, @09:21
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Okay, maybe I said the quoted text under a biased GPL view. But it is the same.
Users of software have the right to develop the software they are using. Software authors have the right to make their software stay free. GPL is one license that provides that protection. I like that about it.
Your license is clear, but you still can't port KWord to QT/non-free because it's GPLed.
Why wouldn't my boss pay me to port KWord to Windows? Thankfully, QT is GPLed, so nobody can prevent other developers from porting it to windows. I just think its very redundant to do it, since QT already did it.
Trolltech is contradicting themselves. They release the same toolkit in both GPL license and license that is not GPL compatibile. How would you feel like if Linus Torvalds would say: Okay, the kernel is under a dual license, I can make proprietary changes to it, but you can't, because you didn't pay me for the license. The license is 1M $. Obviously the success of Linux would never happen. |
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Re: Trolltech: No-Charge License for Qt/Windows
by Vedran Rodic on Wednesday 27/Jun/2001, @09:30
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A Question!
If I as a developer in a "commercial setting" make a patch that fixes a bug in QT/GPL, my patch obviously falls under the GPL. Now, GPL does not allow the code under it to be made proprietary. What happens if I somebody from trolltech includes the fix in their tree?
Does it automatically go in QT/Windows tree? If yes, it can't. And if you say that you are "rewriting" every fix that comes from a KDE developer separately for QT/non-free, please don't, it just sounds funny.
Maybe you are paranoid and you are keeping the bugs in QT/non-free?
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Re: Trolltech: No-Charge License for Qt/Windows
by Matthias Ettrich on Wednesday 27/Jun/2001, @11:01
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As a commercial entity, we have to take licensing and copyright issues very seriously. Send us a patch > 15 lines and you'll find out.
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Re: Trolltech: No-Charge License for Qt/Windows
by Matthias Ettrich on Wednesday 27/Jun/2001, @11:25
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> Users of software have the right to develop the
> software they are using.
Wrong. Users of Free software have this right. Users of commercial software have whatever right the copyright holder grants them in the end user licensing agreement.
FYI: commercial users of our software get the entire source code and the right to do modifications for the sake of their products.
> Your license is clear, but you still can't port
> KWord to QT/non-free because it's GPLed.
Yes. Where did you get the impression from that this is what we want to achieve with the Qt Non Commercial Edition? http://www.trolltech.com/products/download/freelicense/noncommercial-dl.html clearly talks about the incompatiblilty with the GPL.
> Trolltech is contradicting themselves. They
> release the same toolkit in both GPL license and
> license that is not GPL compatibile.
Qt/X11 and Qt/Windows are not the same product.
Show me a company of our size that contributed more GPL'd code to Linux and is still healthy in business and growing. Then release at least as much professional code under the GNU GPL as we did and stay in business. Then come back to me and critize me.
No need to answer, for me this discussion is closed.
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Re: Trolltech: No-Charge License for Qt/Windows
by Vedran on Wednesday 27/Jun/2001, @12:58
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I know, I know and I know and I'm sorry.
I guess I just wanted to try changing your mind. I will respect your wishes of not wanting QT for Win32 to be Free (this sentence is probably not needed, since I still haven't proven that I can do that).
I'm not some envious bastard wanting to ruin a solid business of decent company just because I can. I feel that QT was kind of forced into GPL and I don't like that fact.
The only thing I wanted to achieve here is being able to finally say:
Okay I can use this great cross platform toolkit, I can make win32 apps on my linux box and test them with Wine, I don't have to cope with quirky licences anymore, I'm happy with GPL, and I have a complete control of my Free system. It is now a standard GUI toolkit. Everywhere. Lets move on.
And I really want to be able to witness that a another bar has been raised (as linas, the author of gnucash has nicely put it in http://www.linas.org/theory/freetrade.html).
Anyway, I found a couple of interesting articles on cross platform GUI development at http://www.t4p.com/xplat.htm
and http://www2.linuxjournal.com/lj-issues/issue49/2723.html
Friendly, Vedran
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Re: Trolltech: No-Charge License for Qt/Windows
by Dre on Thursday 28/Jun/2001, @00:40
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> > Your license is clear, but you still can't port
> > KWord to QT/non-free because it's GPLed.
>
> Yes. Where did you get the impression from that this is what we want to
> achieve with the Qt Non Commercial Edition?
> http://www.trolltech.com/products/download/freelicense/noncommercial-dl.html
> clearly talks about the incompatiblilty with the GPL.
Just to clarify a few things. Nothing prevents anyone from *porting* KWord
to Qt Non-commercial and, under the proper circumstances, distributing this KWord in binary form.
If you look at Section 2 of the GPL, it says you are free to modify the
GPL'd work (KWord) in any way you wish; this would include modifying KWord
(or Konqueror) to work with Qt Non-commercial. However, Section 2(b) goes on to say that if you then go
ahead and *distribute* the modified work, you have to include the whole
package under a GPL-compatible license (which Qt Non-commercial is not).
So the premise has to be that you distribute Qt Non-commerical (together
with kdelibs and any other Qt Non-commerical-compatible-licensed software) separately
from KWord/Konqueror/GPL-app.
Some would argue that even if you distribute it separately the Qt
Non-commerical is still part of the "whole" and thus must be GPL-
compatible, as they were designed to "link together" (this argument came up in the old days before Qt was GPL'd). However, Section 2 of the GPL also has an exception for this:
If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the
Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and
separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms,
do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as
separate works.
In my view Qt Non-commerical could be considered to satisfy the premise of that clause,
so you can distribute KWord designed to link to Qt Non-commercial as long
as the user gets the kdelibs separately (i.e., not from you).
Remember the GPL was written so that people could use GPL'd programs
on proprietary Unixes (particulary proprietary libc's). However, this
exception was not meant to permit the proprietary Unix vendors to
distribute these GPL'd programs as well; hence the requirement to
distribute the GPL and non-compatible works "as separate works".
Thus, if someone distributes Qt Non-commercial and kdelibs on CD to users (or makes it available for download), and somebody else compiles and distributes KWord/Konqueror/etc. separately to work on this system, then I don't see a GPL violation (though of course a persuasive argument could change my mind).
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Re: Trolltech: No-Charge License for Qt/Windows
by blandry on Thursday 28/Jun/2001, @06:05
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God I hate not having an html option. So I'm just going to put asterisks around everything you said.
***Section 2 of the GPL also has an exception for this:
If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works.***
No it does not. I just checked the GPL license in the file COPYING for the linux kernel and it's not there. It bears a startling resemblance to an LGPL passage, but s/Program/Library. Although I'm sure you didn't mean it, this is a serious piece of misinformation and at least one other person in this topic is citing it.
***Remember the GPL was written so that people could use GPL'd programs on proprietary Unixes (particulary proprietary libc's).***
True dat! .. falling under the nebulous "major components" exception (the part that begins "as a special exception, ..."), which libc almost certainly falls under and many would argue qt/win does not. Another place the GPL ought to be more explicit. The "and so on" bit is too vague. Stallman used it to "attack" (and I use that term loosely) pre-GPL qt/x11 even tho it was shipped by default in several linux distributions and could therefore be considered (by me) to be a major component. Nobody would argue that NT's gui libraries weren't a major component. Almost a chicken-egg problem there. Yes, I know MS doesn't ship qt/win with their OS (wouldn't that be interesting tho :) .. damn I'm sorry I guess we've all been down this road before.
***However, this exception was not meant to permit the proprietary Unix vendors to distribute these GPL'd programs as well;***
Tell that to (old-school) NeXT. Alternatively, http://www.sun.com/gnome
Man it's late.
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Re: Trolltech: No-Charge License for Qt/Windows
by Dre on Thursday 28/Jun/2001, @06:44
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> > Section 2 of the GPL also has an exception for this:
> > If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the
> > Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate
> > works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not
> > apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works.
>
> No it does not. I just checked the GPL license in the file COPYING
> for the linux kernel and it's not there.
[ ... ]
Try http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.
> > Remember the GPL was written so that people could use GPL'd programs on
> > proprietary Unixes (particulary proprietary libc's).
>
> True dat! .. falling under the nebulous "major components" exception
> (the part that begins "as a special exception, ..."), which libc almost
> certainly falls under and many would argue qt/win does not. Another
> place the GPL ought to be more explicit. The "and so on" bit is too
> vague. Stallman used it to "attack" (and I use that term loosely) pre-GPL
> qt/x11 even tho it was shipped by default in several linux distributions
> and could therefore be considered (by me) to be a major component.
Well that is the old argument again and you are right that it is tougher
in this case (since you don't even have the source code to Qt Noncommercial
to distribute and it would be less of a system component for the reasons you
state). Of course I wouldn't suggest that KDE does this -- Heaven forbid! -- but it's a gray
area so someone, perhaps an individual, could do it (assuming the app's
developers don't object). Anyway, if you use MS Visual Studio I think
everyone would agree the libc/libstdc++ are system components, so the only
issue would be Qt Noncommerical itself. And Qt Noncommerical is not so
unlike Motif in terms of how convincingly you can say it is a system
component, and in terms of it not being not distributed by the vendor or
available in source code . . . and certainly there were a good number of
GPL Motif apps.
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Re: Trolltech: No-Charge License for Qt/Windows
by blandry on Thursday 28/Jun/2001, @16:11
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>>>Try http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.
gah! doh.. I misread.. my deepest apologies. I guess it really *was* late.
Well, now that my credibility is shot to hell, I'll go ahead and point out the exception to the exception which sez you can't distribute these components and the GPL components 'together'.. I realize this is the point you were making in yer previous posts; and which I also think shoots down my stupid linux distros theory. Now I just wonder how the heck sun is legally going to bundle gnome.
again, apologies for the misread.
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