> The pain you speak of, is this from a purely "legal" stand point? > If so, in what manner does it hinder or "cause pain" to an end user?
I'm not a lawyer so I never speak from a "legal" standpoint, even when I'm talking about licenses. The pain is from a technical standpoint. If I make a modification that I think others would also enjoy, I had better hope the project team accepts it into the core; otherwise it will be not only onerous for me to maintain (just ask Christian Tismer), but also onerous for the end user to build from source. (The same end user who might be quite comfortable following instructions that say "type configure; then type make; then type make install", might be deeply mistified by tools like diff and patch.) What this constraint does accomplish is that if deep philosophical differences leave one with no choice but to fork (q.v. XEmacs), it makes it much harder for the forkers to succeed in taking mindshare away from the original developers. But if the original developer abandons the project, it also makes it more difficult for the code to take on a life of its own, and find another owner to care for it. My dislike of QPL does not apply to QT itself, since Troll Tech is kind enough to make that available under GPL as well. -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
