Messages in this thread | | | From | "Downing, Thomas" <> | Subject | Troll Tech [was RE: Sco vs. IBM] | Date | Thu, 19 Jun 2003 13:37:28 -0400 |
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I'm no authority, but IMHO
> In article <20030619141443.GR29247@fs.tum.de>, > Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de> wrote: > >There's no license reason today why there are two big > desktop projects > >(GNOME and KDE). > > There is. If you want to develop a commercial application under > KDE you need to pay TrollTech for the Qt license. Basically > TrollTech controls all commercial KDE applications.
No, you don't, IFF you distribute the source code. Doesn't make a lot of sense though. So consider, a for-profit company licenses QT for a proprietary app. They send bug fixes/enhancements to QT to TrollTech. If these migrate to Free QT, you're ahead of the game. If they don't, what did you lose?
> Which makes no sense. You're not at the mercy of Linus or the > kernel developers, neither at that of the KDE developers, but > TrollTech controls the KDE desktop wrt commercial apps.
No, they don't. KDE uses the GPL for QT. If I build a commercial app using KDE, it is GPL. If I build a commercial app not using KDE, but using commercial QT, that has no effect on the KDE desktop.
> What if TrollTech decides to only license (or sell) Qt > to, say, Microsoft? What does that mean for, say, the Kompany ?
They can't. They released the code under GPL. They can stop maintaining that code, and continue on a proprietary track. If they did, what did you lose?
In summary, QT -> GPL, GNOME - GPL, what about _that_ makes one or the other inherently preferable or better?
P.S. for once I am in complete agreement with larry m. ;-) - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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