Hiya, It's really sad what's happening with Nokia. To me it just proves the point that important FLOSS projects are best off being governed by an independent foundation. I'm not sure what this all means to the KDE QT Foundation (http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php ), but quite frankly I don't care much about the "commercial" side of things. I intentionally use the quotes, because I strongly agree with the FSF that "commercial" is a word to avoid (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Commercial ). FLOSS can be commercial, but I don't agree with David Wheeler that it's (almost) always the case. It's too much a spin on words and definitions if you ask me. It's a typical problem when you hijack a word and mix it up with several legal viewpoints. This creates a big mush in which you can 'prove' almost anything. When you look at the legal definitions of a word, you can only and exclusively use those definitions inside the specific domain it applies to. Lifting it from its context and trying to prove a much larger, 'universal' point is generally a bad idea, because it can create much haziness which helps nobody.
Regarding Qt, I can say I never really warmed up to it. When Trolltech finally managed to fix the licensing issues I already turned my back to it and never really returned. However, it is a real important project, and I sincerely hope the development of Qt won't be depending on all the dark business voodoo that's going on around Nokia. On the supposed restrictions on the use of FLOSS in defense & aerospace I call a big "crap alert". You only need to point to the programming language Ada, which is an international standard and its major implementation GNAT is Free Software. GNAT is part of the GNU Compiler Collection and is used widely among aerospace & defence around the world. You only need to remind someone that the DoD itself created the language in the first place and opened it up. Thanks for the blog post, it's great food for thought! Cheers, Jelle On 2011-03-14 16:32:07 +0100 Matthias Kirschner <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > just wrote a blog article about Nokia's statement where they announce > selling the proprietary Qt business to Digia. > > I am interested in your opinion. > > Regards, > Matthias > _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list [email protected] https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
