On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 3:50 PM, Roberto Gordo Saez
<roberto.gordo(a)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