Qt and the GPL

[David Johnson]

On Mon, 04 Sep 2000, Nelson Rush wrote:
> I mentioned the idea of triple licensing (or dual licensing) qt in this way
> in June to Trolltech. They told me where I could stick it then and it looks
> like they've reconsidered it now.

You also have to consider the history of Trolltech. Everytime they have
taken one step forward, huge sectors of the community have jumped
them enmass and bitched that they didn't take a big enough step. Letting
people use the library with no cost for OSS wasn't good enough (and it
wasn't). Changing to a OSS license wasn't good enough. Considering a
GPL-compatible v2 of the QPL wasn't good enough. Even the guy who wrote
most of the QPL turned on them and became their biggest critic. They
could have kept their product 100% proprietary and received only a tiny
fraction of the grief.

If they got a bit snippy on you, just remember that they've had
thousands of people be snippy to them first.

> He said, "Well, we're a company and we've got to
> make money." So, of course I thought why not just GPL & proprietary license,
> ala id Software and Quake 1. He said it would be impossible. I didn't
> understand why.

The reason it would have been impossible is that it would cause a huge
number of Qt based applications, including major portions of KDE, be
become illegal. With a GPL/Proprietary dual-license one has to either
write a GPL application or pay for a license. This would leave all of
the BSD, MIT, Artistic and even LGPL authors out in the cold.

But the triple licensing is a stroke of genius the more I think about
it. Qt is Free for Free Software, Open Source for Open Source Software
and proprietary for proprietary software. You can't get much more
equitable than that. If you were the one who planted this idea in their
heads, congratulations!

 -- 
David Johnson
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