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List:       kde-freeqt
Subject:    [freeqt] Strategy?
From:       Matt Heck <mheck () www ! surveyorcorp ! com>
Date:       1999-04-02 22:14:58
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On Thu, 1 Apr 1999, Richard Stallman wrote:

> If the copyright on Harmony is assigned to the FSF,
> we will release it under the GPL, not the LGPL.
> We don't want to risk a legal clash with TrollTech,
> if we can achieve our goals without that risk.
> If the developers keep the copyright, then the decision about the
> license is up to them, but I'd recommend following that same course of
> action.

If I may make an observation and a few recommendations:

It doesn't seem like there's much advantage to simply making a GPL version
of Qt, vs. an LGPL one, UNLESS you put some other features in it.  Options
would seem to include:

* Better cross-platform development potential
* Better multi-threading
* Faster execution/hardware acceleration
* Faster compilation

One other point that might be worth making: is there any problem with
expanding GPL to LGPL?  If TrollTech either folds or for whatever reason
just doesn't care in a few years, LGPL would seem to be something doable.
Of course, you could argue that either of those situations would result in
Qt becoming LGPL itself.  However, this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Developing both Harmony and Qt in parallel has the immediate advantage of
offering an alternative to Qt's license, and making porting to other
platforms possible.  But if Qt eventually goes GPL or LGPL, both codebases
can be closely scrutinized, profiled, and integrated into a
third-generation package that could very likely include all the best
features of both packages, at maximum performance.  In the end, this would
be an excellent thing for the community.

So basically, while I personally think an LGPL'd Harmony is more useful,
I do understand that scared developers aren't productive developers-- and
in the long run, a GPL'd Harmony really is still better than no Harmony at
all.

As for my part, I'm concentrating my efforts on wxWindows right now-- but
if Harmony can release something usable for Linux, I'll seriously consider
contributing to the Win32 version, and porting my video capture stuff for
both platforms from wxWindows to Harmony.  It uses Video For Windows on
Win32, and will use Video For Linux on Linux (presently we're using
Allesandro Rubini's Brooktree 848 driver raw for testing).

And gentlemen, always remember the immortal words of Michael Abrash,
patron saint of the cycle-counter:

        "Never forget that reinventing the wheel means you
              know exactly how the wheel works."

Cheers,
   Matt

____________________
Matt Heck
Surveyor Corporation

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