On Sun, Dec 20, 1998 at 09:31:17PM -0700, Richard Stallman wrote: > ... A combined work would have a shared Copyright > and still be under the GNU GPL which would prevent Troll Tech from > releasing the combined work under other licensing terms. > > This would almost certainly cause a rift to develop between their > Professional Edition and their Free Edition as development forks into at > least two directions... > > To release Qt under the GNU GPL would save the free software community > a lot of trouble. If worries about a fork are the reason > that Troll Tech is not doing this, maybe I can help.
Maybe you can at that. > I'd be willing to promise to actively urge programmers to avoid such a > fork, in this way: > > If Troll Tech releases Qt under the GPL, and if they are willing to > make a promise to a contributor that "All of your code that we use in > any way, will appear in the GPL-covered release of Qt", > > then I am willing to personally urge that contributor to cooperate > fully with Troll Tech, and allow them to use his code under their > non-free license, as well as under the GPL. I see two difficulties with this. While I admit you doing that would have a great and positive impact on the amount of code Troll Tech would be able to incorporate, using a non-GNU license, be it compatible with the GNU licenses or not may be better from a technical standpoint. The reason I think this would be better is that while someone could easily GPL their patch for Qt and license it also such that Troll Tech could use it, they might use other people's GPL code which they don't have permission to give permission for Troll Tech to relicense. This problem does not go away under a non-GNU license, but having the difference should at least have the patch author aware the license is not the GPL and hopefully they would take the licensing issues under more serious consideration. The other reason they might be better off going with a non-GNU license is that the GNU General Public License is essentially compatible with itself and any license which has either sublicensing (LGPL) or which have terms which apply no restrictions the GPL does not. Licenses which fail the GPL compatibility test include the original BSD license (advertising clause), the perl Artistic license (does things differently than the GPL does), the various licenses Netscape has come up with, and probably a few others I may or may not know about but are still free software. Troll Tech's stated goal is to be compatible with all of these licenses which meet the Open Source Definition (and because of the origins of that document, the Debian Free Software Guidelines) Using the GPL would cause that to be not easily possible. Using the LGPL would harm Troll Tech's interests severely--we can all agree to that. The best solution then is to write a license which is compatible with the OSD/DFSG--including the GPL. This is what I am trying to accomplish. I do realize that to accomplish this runs at least some rish of forded development, but I think I can minimize this if I am careful to indicate Troll's preferences in the license but still allow pretty much everything the GPL does. The Trolls are a little worried about forking if the license allows it too easily. > I think the benefit of having Qt available under a better license, and > one that's compatible with GNU software, would be worth that effort. I think it's worth a lot of effort, personally. I devoted two weeks to working on 0.90 to create what became 0.91, and I'm still willing to do whatever is necessary to make it compatible with the GPL. > Troll Tech wishes anyone to be able to > use their Free Edition to produce Free Software, under any Free Software > license. > > The QPL does not achieve this goal; it does not allow combining Qt > with a program under the GPL. > > If they want to allow this, in addition to allowing other free > software licenses that the current QPL allows, I can help. I'll make sure to Cc you when I toss my next set of proposed changes on the table for nitpicking, commenting, and trying to see if it will do what we all hope for. I'm confident I can do it and I hope Troll Tech likes the results. -- NO ONE expects the Spanish Inquisition!
