Qt/Embedded

[kmself at ix.netcom.com]

on Sun, Nov 12, 2000 at 09:40:10PM -0800, David Johnson (david at usermode.org) wrote:
> When Trolltech announced that they were offering their Qt/Embedded product 
> under the GPL, I initially assumed that it would be a dual GPL/QPL license 
> just like Qt/X11. I was wrong. It is only under the GPL and their proprietary 
> license.
> 
> This brings up an interesting quandery. There are lots of non-GPL 
> applications that use Qt. What will their relationship with Qt/Embedded be? 

Not sure.  This is a specific issue that's been raised by Sun and
Netscape in deciding to dual license their technologies under a
combination of GNU GPL and other licenses. 

> On one hand the GPL dictates the license of all applications that
> reference the library's interface. On the other hand, the interface
> for for Qt/Embedded is nearly identical to Qt/X11, so that many
> programs can be ported with a few #ifdefs and a recompile.
> 
> Will a BSD or MIT application even be able to use these #ifdefs so
> that the end user can recompile in private? 

Oblig: IANAL

It's generally accepted that the MIT license is convertible to GPL, as
is BSD without advertising clause.  Programs licensed under such terms
might be considered GPLd if linked to the Qt libraries.

> Will embedded platforms be off limits to these applications? For GPL
> authors, this is a non-issue, but for the rest of us its frustrating
> (imagine the next version of GTK+ being under the GPL license and
> you're a Mozilla developer).

Mozilla is going to be released under a dual or multi-license scheme,
including the GNU GPL, and possibly the GNU LGPL, as well as the MozPL
and some legacy NPL code (last I'd heard, NPL was being strongly
deprecated in favor of MozPL).  There's an announcement of same at
http://www.mozilla.org/.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>     http://www.netcom.com/~kmself
 Evangelist, Zelerate, Inc.                      http://www.zelerate.org
  What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?      There is no K5 cabal
   http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/        http://www.kuro5hin.org
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