Qt and the GPL

[kmself at ix.netcom.com]

On Mon, Sep 04, 2000 at 05:57:53PM -0700, David Johnson wrote:
> 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. 

It could have been worse -- they could be Sun.

Note that both Troll and Sun have come around to at least a partial
embrace of the GPL (I'd say Troll's taken the larger step -- Qt is a
bigger part of their business by orders of magnitude than StarOffice is
of Sun's).  The problem was with Troll, KDE, and Sun making noises that
they were in fact:

   1). OSI/OpenSource
   2). GPL compatible, and/or
   3). Unfairly persecuted

...which IMO really crossed up a lot of folks.  If you want to play the
FS/OS game, play it.  If you want to be close, but not quite, there,
then 'fess up.  BitMover (BitKeeper License) is an example of the other.
Larry McVoy unabashadly says it's not OSI Open Source certified, but
it's close enough.  Larry's also trying to make a buck, and by reports,
he's at least moderately successful.  KDE and Sun were trying to
hand-wave the problem away, and we're sorry, but that just didn't work.
We're now seeing substantive change.  Yes, it would have been nice to
see it six, nine, twelve, eighteen months ago, but....

> 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. 

I'd have a difference of opinion here.  A GPL-compatible license
(essentially:  a GPL-convertible license) would be good enough for me.
But it would have to be what it said it was.

> 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.

No.  BSD, MIT, Artistic, and LGPL are all convertible to GPL.  You'd
leave out those people who were using these licenses to interoperate
with software licensed under non-GPL terms as a single work.

> 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!

Ditto, both counts.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>     http://www.netcom.com/~kmself
 Evangelist, Opensales, Inc.                    http://www.opensales.org
  What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?   Debian GNU/Linux rocks!
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