Re: Troll Tech [was RE: Sco vs. IBM]

John K Luebs
2003-06-21T06:18:09Z

On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 01:37:28PM -0400, Downing, Thomas wrote:
>
> > In article <20030619141443.GR29247@fs.tum.de>,
> > Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de> wrote:
> > >There's no license reason today why there are two big
> > desktop projects
> > >(GNOME and KDE).
> >
> > There is. If you want to develop a commercial application under
> > KDE you need to pay TrollTech for the Qt license. Basically
> > TrollTech controls all commercial KDE applications.
>
> No, you don't, IFF you distribute the source code. Doesn't make
> a lot of sense though. So consider, a for-profit company licenses
> QT for a proprietary app. They send bug fixes/enhancements to QT
> to TrollTech. If these migrate to Free QT, you're ahead of the game.
> If they don't, what did you lose?
>
[snip]
> > What if TrollTech decides to only license (or sell) Qt
> > to, say, Microsoft? What does that mean for, say, the Kompany ?
>
> They can't. They released the code under GPL. They can stop maintaining
> that code, and continue on a proprietary track. If they did, what
> did you lose?

Correct, and this is simple thing is what a lot of anti-KDE folk will
absolutely refuse to accept.

>
> In summary, QT -> GPL, GNOME - GPL, what about _that_ makes one or
> the other inherently preferable or better?

No, the core GNOME and GTK+ libraries are licensed under the terms of
the LGPL. This essentially means closed source works can link to
these libraries. You can't do that with Qt. Whether this is a positive
or a negative is not appropriate to discuss here.

Probably surprising to many (based on the proliferation of ignorant remarks
on various mailing lists), Troll Tech's Qt offering is aligned
more closely with the FSF philosophy than GTK/GNOME (remember the L in LGPL
stands for LESSER after all (well the FSF prefers this now, but the
GNOME/GTK folks continue to use the former version of the license
where the L stands for LIBRARY)).

I think that Qt is a great contribution, but it is misleading to say that
there is no difference between Qt and GNOME licensing.

--jkl