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List:       kde-freeqt
Subject:    Re: [freeqt] Greetings!
From:       Jo Dillon <emily () thelonious ! new ! ox ! ac ! uk>
Date:       1999-02-17 12:53:43
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Matt Heck (mheck@www.surveyorcorp.com) spake thusly:
> solution, and it seems appropriate (and useful) for Harmony to have
> eventually reached that capability.  Qt's license for Windows, incidently,
> was not quite as usable as its license for Linux.  Considering I will
> DEFINITELY have to extend whatever toolkit we wind up using for a
> high-performance video framebuffer, we're still leery of Qt's "mostly
> kinda open if you ain't sellin' anything" license.  Frankly, as odd as it
> seems, a completely commercial license for Qt would've almost been as
> acceptable as an L/GPL license for my immediate needs-- it's the
> confusion and half-assedness of the current license that makes us leery of
> it.  It's one of those things where we'd never be quite sure what we
> could do with it.

  Umm...I think that if you a) buy the commercial license and b)
don't distribute modified Qt source you can pretty much do whatever you
like with your version of Qt. I suggest you ask the Trolls for clarification.
> 
> As far as Harmony not being multi-platform, I am aware that at least one
> person was considering a Mac port, after the initial effort was stable

  That was me - since the company I'm working for would have needed it.
> 
> One concern that would come up for me is knowing the particulars of the
> legal issues that scared off the developers.  APIs can't be copyrighted,
> much less patented, and with the source code (for Harmony) freely
> available for inspection, it should be obvious that the code is not based
> off of Qt.  Was there a more coherent threat?

  Not really. Trolltech refused to confirm or deny that they'd sue,
but the developers didn't take Qt source. But legal cases are still
scary, even if there's no reason to think they'd succeed.


-- 

	Jo

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