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List:       kde-freeqt
Subject:    Re: [freeqt] Licensing problem with the QPL and more
From:       Eirik Eng <eiriken () troll ! no>
Date:       1998-11-30 15:09:43
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Carl Thompson <cet@elinux.net> writes:
>      I would trust you too, If you could address my concerns about the
> control TT would exert over Linux commercial development should KDE/QT
> become the standard.  Even just your promise that Troll Tech will do the
> right thing in this respect would go a long way.  What are your intentions? 

Our intentions are to have fun while developing the best GUI toolkit
possible. To be able to do that we need a normal salary to pay for food
and housing. Doing that by selling Qt licenses is not as easy as some
people seem to believe.

Many people seem to confuse "closed source" development with "commercial"
development. Troll Tech never has, and never will, control Open Source
development with Qt, commercial development or other development.

As far as closed source development is concerned, there are no run-time
royalties and our license price makes up an extremely small part of total
development costs in any professional development project. We intend to
keep it that way.

Let me tell you a little bit more about who we are and how we got where we
are today. In 1993 Haavard Nord and I saw that there was no good
GUI-toolkit out there. We tried to get funding, but nobody believed in our
idea. In 1994 I quit a well paid job, and Haavard went straight from
university to our new company. For more than a year we lived off our wives
and coded day and night without a single penny's income. Slowly we started
seeing results and instead of taking out a decent salary we started hiring
other developers to further improve Qt. Today we are 7 developers, and we
own the company together. All major decisions are done by the developers.

We use Linux as our main development platform. We use emacs (OK, some use
vi :-), egcs and gdb on a daily basis. We feel committed to and indebted to
the free software community. We also feel that we are paying something
back. One of us has contributed to the Linux kernel, and several have
participated in other Open Source projects. We have used a lot of time,
energy and money to do things like making snapshots of the Qt source code
publicly available, (Previously as tarballs, but we will soon make this
available via CVS), establish the KDE Free Qt Foundation, prepare and
release the QPL, etc.

In fact we are so sure that we are never going to take away rights from
Open Source developers that we established the KDE Free Qt Foundation to
make this legally binding. It was quite amusing to see the lawyers'
reactions when we tried to explain that we wanted to pay them money to
make it impossible for us to stop giving something away for free. It
simply didn't make sense in their world.

> Many of the developers on this list are afraid that you would hit them with
> a lawsuit if they complete a toolkit that uses QT's API.  Is that true? 

I know there has been a lot of discussions around a supposed lawsuit
threat from Troll Tech. It all comes from a private mail that was sent by
one if us concerning use of the Qt header files and documentation, and the
answer was "We don't know".

We are not lawyers, we are developers, and we do not want to sue people.
On the other hand I cannot guarantee that we will never sue the Harmony
project. Who knows what will happen in the future. If e.g. some Redmond
based company starts pumping funding into Harmony to "embrace and extend"
Qt we might consider suing.

> Isn't there some way that you could release QT for Linux under a license
> that we are more comfortable with and still make a profit?

I must ask who "we" are in this context. Of the more than 100 email
reactions we have received after we released the draft version of the QPL,
less than 5 have been negative. And I must say that all this positive
feedback has been a refreshing change to all the harsh criticism we have
received previously.

The QPL is released as a draft. We are collecting all feedback we are
getting and will make a new version based on that feedback.

> Particularly, Could Linux be a special case for you?  No other needed
> library on Linux requires commercial developers to pay anyone to use
> them, so I am uncomfortable with the precedent that this would create if
> QT becomes standard.

We require closed source developers to pay, commercial developers who make 
Open Source software do not pay.

Even if the majority of developers start using Qt, this would not take
away people's choice. The GUI library cannot become the "exclusive
standard" as long as it uses the X Window System and standard window
manager mechanisms. Look at what Star Division has done with Star
Office. They have neatly integrated their product with the KDE desktop
without using Qt. As far as we can ensure it, this will also be possible
in the future. Nobody will be "forced" to use Qt to make a closed source
product work with KDE.

>      Again, I must offer my apologies to everyone, but especially to the
> developers at Troll Tech.

Accepted. And thank you for being so frank about this issue. It is
sometimes hard to take all the criticism we get out there, it does get to
you personally when many people repeatedly call you evil.

Sincerely,

    Eirik (President of Troll Tech, and still a developer even though
    -----  these political issues steal lots of my time)
-- 
    eiriken@troll.no                                      Fax: +47 22806380
    Troll Tech AS, Waldemar Thranes gt. 98, N-0175 Oslo, Norway

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