Re: Your petition to GPL Qt

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

      ... A combined work would have a shared Copyright
    and still be under the GNU GPL which would prevent Troll Tech from
    releasing the combined work under other licensing terms.

    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...

To release Qt under the GNU GPL would save the free software community
a lot of trouble.  If worries about a fork are the reason
that Troll Tech is not doing this, maybe I can help.

I'd be willing to promise to actively urge programmers to avoid such a
fork, in this way:

    If Troll Tech releases Qt under the GPL, and if they are willing to
    make a promise to a contributor that "All of your code that we use in
    any way, will appear in the GPL-covered release of Qt",

    then I am willing to personally urge that contributor to cooperate
    fully with Troll Tech, and allow them to use his code under their
    non-free license, as well as under the GPL.

I think the benefit of having Qt available under a better license, and
one that's compatible with GNU software, would be worth that effort.

      Troll Tech wishes anyone to be able to
    use their Free Edition to produce Free Software, under any Free Software
    license.

The QPL does not achieve this goal; it does not allow combining Qt
with a program under the GPL.

If they want to allow this, in addition to allowing other free
software licenses that the current QPL allows, I can help.