Troll Tech [was RE: Sco vs. IBM]

Downing, Thomas
2003-06-19T17:23:35Z

I'm no authority, but IMHO

> 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?

> Which makes no sense. You're not at the mercy of Linus or the
> kernel developers, neither at that of the KDE developers, but
> TrollTech controls the KDE desktop wrt commercial apps.

No, they don't. KDE uses the GPL for QT. If I build a commercial
app using KDE, it is GPL. If I build a commercial app not using
KDE, but using commercial QT, that has no effect on the KDE desktop.

> 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?

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

P.S. for once I am in complete agreement with larry m. ;-)