[LAU] licensing fun, was Re: Yamaha Disklavier Pro grand piano

[James Stone]

> The licenses for Eisenkraut and FScape (both under the GPL) are
> restricted in similar fashion to LinuxSampler :
>
> "please note that you are /not allowed/ to use this software if you are
> a member of a military or pharmaceutical or governmental institution
> (excluding public service in general and civil science/education). if
> you have sympathies for bad governments (applies to most countries), you
> should also opt to /not use/ this software. thank you."
>

I think this statement is not part of the license (the page says the
program is licensed under GPL). IIRC, zynaddsubfx used to have a
similarly non-free statement about not using the program to write
music "against God" (such as heavy metal).. (I'm not sure Christian
heavy metal bands would agree with this but... whatever!). I think it
was discussed briefly on this forum and people concluded that this was
merely the authors wish, and was not part of the legally binding
license.. now whether that is legally OK I don't know. LS takes a
different approach and tries to integrate their wish more closely into
the license documentation, saying GPL applies apart from for
commercial implementations - in commercial software and hardware.. So
although it is shades of grey, this is seen as non-free whereas the
others are seen as free (although the others are vastly more
unreasonable in my opinion)..

What I don't quite understand is that Qt has a free/commercial
separate licensing, but no-one has the same kind of problem with qt
that they have with LS? Would someone care to explain?

James