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

[Randy Kramer]

On Thursday 18 September 2008 11:05 am, Arnold Krille wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 18. September 2008 schrieb James Stone:
> > 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?
> 
> No one??? You surely are funny! What do you think why gnome was 
founded???
> 
> Not because Qt wasn't free, but because Qt wasn't free enough. Kind of 
like 
> the same as with LS/Eisenkraut/etc. not being free enough.

You are right in that Qt wasn't free enough (in the opinion of, for 
example, Richard Stallman, and I agreed (FWIW ;-)), but dual licensing 
was not the issue at that time.  

I can't recall the issue exactly, but, in fact, dual licensing was a 
solution to the issue--Qt was not free at the time, by adopting the GPL 
(and dual licensing to protect their commercial interests), Qt became 
acceptable to people like Richard Stallman.  (I'm not 100% sure Richard 
Stallman has ever said that, or maybe more to the point, iirc, I think 
he may have some bias towards Gnome that was not overcome when Qt 
adopted the GPL.)

Randy Kramer
--
I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I created a video 
instead.--with apologies to Cicero, et.al.