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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Does KDE want to limit or destroy its commercial acceptance?
From:       "Paul Hampson" <phampson () linuxmail ! org>
Date:       2003-12-29 21:49:15
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"..the KDE project does not mandate any single Open Source license as long as the \
license is Open Source. By far, the most common license for the KDE libraries is \
LGPL, and the most common for applications is GPL. Code that we may explicitly want \
people to incorporate into (possibly closed-source) applications may use other \
licenses."

Particularly note this line: "Code that we may explicitly want people to incorporate \
into (possibly closed-source) applications may use other licenses."

That statement seems very weird to me. It seems to deny development of proprietary \
software without the express permission of the KDE community. Does this not hinder \
the acceptance of Linux by the general computer using community? It appears that you \
are frowning on closed source applications. However I hold the view that without some \
proprietary software the Linux community cannot come into acceptance as the general \
public and businesses will see the Linux system as ill supported. 

Should we not encourage people/companies to port their software to Linux? This then \
comes to the issue of Qt, which is an excellent tool for compiling on many platforms \
and allows developers to deploy an a wide variety of systems. Isnt this just what \
Linux needs? It needs to encourage top quality applications to port to Linux so \
people can see what we have to offer. If we get people using proprietary on Linux, we \
can get them to begin to use Opensource software. KDE's statement at the start of the \
email, is quoted from their site [see \
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/books/kde-2.0-development/ch19lev1sec2.html ] \
seems to hinder development of what could be a lifeline for linux to pulled out of \
its seeming obscurity. 

The following quote is taken from \
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~lang/hotlist/free/licence/troll/faq-freeedition.html :

"The LGPL is designed to "permit developers of non-free programs to use free \
libraries" (quote from the LGPL). In other words, if Qt were LGPL'd, companies would \
not have to buy the Professional Edition in order to make commercial (non-free) \
software, they could just use the Free Edition, free of charge. That would mean Troll \
Tech would not get the revenue necessary for improving and extending Qt."

But having the software under LGPL would mean that commercial companies would develop \
commercial software, thus bringing Linux to the general market place, which it is not \
at the moment.

If we consider Qt's closest rival, GTK+ we find several things. If we look at \
http://www.gtk.org/success/ we see that several companies chose the GTK+ system for \
development because of the license. This is not evident in all the success stories as \
many are to do with the quality of the software (which by the way i am _NOT_ \
discussing in this email), however i am sure if we did a survey of several companies \
and told them that if they had the choice between free, powerful development software \
that would allow them to port to many types of systems with little engineering and \
gave them the ability to choose their liscense (as GTK+ is LGPL'd) over one that is \
very similar yet they have to pay for they would choose the free one. 

Finally a statement from an article found on itworld.com:

"Many programmers now actively seek out licenses such as LGPL, instead of Motif or \
other toolkits."

GTK and therefore GNOME gives this facility, and as I see it will be adopted by the \
commercial sector a lot quicker.

Regards,
Paul
-- 
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