Re: Your petition to GPL Qt

[Raul Miller <rdm@test.legislate.com>]

Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org> wrote:
> This would almost certainly cause a rift to develop between their
> Professional Edition and their Free Edition as development forks into at
> least two directions, the Free Edition gaining all of the enhancements
> made to the Professional Edition but the converse would not be the case.

I don't agree with this point.

This would be true if there was a strong need to upgrade libQt, and
Troll was not addressing that need.  However, if this is the case then
any free license would allow forking.

Note that even the earlier Qt license couldn't prevent forking (Harmony
would evolved into a fork).  Legal restrictions on copying do not prevent
forking -- technical excellence does.

[I'll grant that Troll may need to re-engineer submissions if they're
not submitted under both licenses.]

> Another argument against your petition is that the GNU GPL is
> compatible with only a small subset of Free Software licenses, using
> the definition of Free Software found in the Debian Free Software
> Guidelines[4] which describe a commonly accepted definition of Free
> Software far beyond the scope of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution.

I don't agree with this point.

The GNU GPL is compatible with a rather large subset of Free Software
licenses.  And, some of the licenses it is not compatible with would
allow incorporation into proprietary works.

-- 
Raul