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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Does KDE want to limit or destroy its commercial acceptance?
From:       Christian Mueller <cmueller () gmx ! de>
Date:       2003-12-30 9:55:37
Message-ID: 200312301055.43147.cmueller () gmx ! de
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Am Dienstag, 30. Dezember 2003 09:14 schrieb Paul Hampson:
> Thanks for you comments. I was not looking to start a debate 
> on the quality of the software. Lets put this debate in a bubble 
> that says the both Qt and GTK are equal. Indeed LGPL may 
> have issues, but would you not agree that linux needs 
> proprietary apps to pull them out of the shadows? 
> LGPL seems to encourage this. What KDE says on its site 
> [see my previous email regarding the limiting of liscensing 
> (the quote at the top of it)] seems to shun this. Is this actually the case?       


There seems to be a misunderstanding.  The text you have quoted is 
about software that goes into KDE itself, not about what can or cannot be 
written by third parties.  

The rule of thumb is:  
It's common that KDE's *own applications* be placed under the GPL
(but any other OpenSource license would be fine, 
as the cited paragraph states), 
but the KDE *libraries* are under the LGPL.  So there is no problem 
writing third party apps (even closed source) using the *libraries*,
and that's the important thing. 

Now Qt is a different matter.  Qt is available under GPL or under 
a commercial license (and the QPL, but that's not relevant to 
this discussion).  So if you're going to write closed source 
KDE or Qt apps you'll have to buy a license from Trolltech. 
(But that's nothing the KDE project can do anything about.)

On the other hand this seems to be accepted by companies wanting
to write closed source software.  They seem to value professional 
quality of toolkits, quality of documentation and professional support 
more.  The list of companies that use Qt is far more impressive than 
the handful of success stories you cited. Besides the 
success stories on http://www.trolltech.com/success/index.html 
there's a list of really well-known customers:
http://www.trolltech.com/company/customers.html
Of course there are also smaller ones not listed there. 

Christian.


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