🚀 go-pugleaf

On 29 Oct 97, Tyson Richard DOWD <trd@holly.cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:

>You obviously don't make many distinctions, do you. Have you noticed
>that you aren't allowed to redistribute modified copies?

yes.  i am more interested in writing something which uses Qt, not
modifying Qt.  I will leave the development to someone else.  I don't care
who that is, as long as they listen to my suggestions (and troll tech does
listen).

>That you have
>to GPL software that uses Qt, while Qt itself is not GPL?

yes

>That if someone else creates software that isn't in line with the
>license, and you use it, you're breaking your license agreement? 

how so ?  if I installed Qt on my system and I bought commercial software
which uses Qt, how am I breaking the license agreement?
Do you mean if I use "pirated" software ?  Or if someone wrote a
commercial app using Qt and they haven't paid for their license ?
They broke the license agreement, not me.

The actual library and source code are free.

>That if you make money from it, you have to buy a commercial license?

fair enough

>Would you be happy if glibc was released under such a license?

i'd be happier if libc was compataible between releases and not so buggy,
something which is definitely not guaranteed in the free software.
But to answer your question, no I wouldn't want libc under such a license.

>Qt is better than most commercial software. But it's still commercial
>software, and your notion of trying to base a free operating system on
>a piece of commerical software is ridiculous.

but for free development and usage, Qt is *free to use*.
It's only commerical to those who develop commercial software!

The only difference between Qt and a truely free tookit is the
upgrade/improvement/debug process, which you submit to troll tech.
You do a similar thing for GNU stuff, where you don't just release
your own hacked version of a toolkit and call it the new toolkit without
going through a submission procedure for the offical release. 

>One purchase from a
>big company, and troll tech disappears, taking the rights to modify the
>source with them. 

If troll tech was a _publicly listed_ company and somebody bought them
out, and if that someone _decided_ to revoke the free license, then this
would apply to any newer version.  This is only a very extreme
possibility.  But why would they revoke it ?  Qt gains much more
popularity if free software uses it.

>And you want to use it to take on NT?
>
>License purity is more important than "oh, so *I* can use it for free,
>that's ok!". 

yes, that's all that matters to me.  the *I* encompasses about 95% of the
Linux users (non-commercial).  The only person who actually pays for Qt
is the commerical developer, not the commerical or free user.

As a last note, if gnome is as good as KDE (or better), then I will use
it. But I can use KDE _right now_ (although it's in beta) and I can
develop for KDE _right now_ too.  What's more, I like KDE because it
makes UNIX easy to use.

I am not interested in forever adding features to a toolkit.  I am more
interested in writing software that uses it.


----
KDE project:  http://www.kde.org
Qt toolkit:   http://www.troll.no/dl