[LAU] licensing fun

[James Stone]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 3:50 PM, Roberto Gordo Saez
<roberto.gordo at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 03:29:38PM +0100, James Stone wrote:
>> 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?
>
> Well, the Qt toolkit is dual licensed. If you choose to use the GPL
> version, it is completely GPL and no exceptions are attached.
> Notice that it is not LGPL, it is GPL only, So if you want to develop
> a proprietary application with Qt, you'll need to get the proprietary
> license from Qt. I have absolutely no problem with this scheme, the GPL
> version is as free (or as restrictive, depending on your point of view)
> as the other GPL libraries that are normally installed in a GNU/Linux
> distribution.

Yes I realised this as soon as I posted it.

However, it really achieves the same ends.. Trolltech gets paid for
commercial implementations of Qt.

The trouble with using a similar license for LS is a major potential
commercial implementation (including it in hardware) would not have to
pay anything for using LS code.. so the developers end out with
nothing. I can see why they did it, but it is annoying that there
couldn't be a more open-source way of licensing it and protecting
their IP... I guess it is still more Free than most closed source
"freeware" though..

James