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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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