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List:       kde-promo
Subject:    Re: Licensing (Was: [kde-promo] What's the community up to?)
From:       Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher () kde ! org>
Date:       2004-12-07 20:31:32
Message-ID: 200412072131.32781.schumacher () kde ! org
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On Tuesday 07 December 2004 17:16, Eva Brucherseifer wrote:
> 
> Can you follow my arguments, if I say, that if there were a
> binary-only version of the Qt/Win-library (without headers and tools)
> for free download and use, than it would be ok to link GPL software?
> 
> And BTW, the Qt library is distributed along the designer which is
> like a compiler. Is this similar to the msvcrt example?

I don't think one of these would work. Almost no Windows user will have 
a Qt library installed, so it can hardly be considered a system 
library.

Even more important for me is that stretching the definition of system 
libraries or working around this stuff in some way would be against the 
intention of the GPL and probably against the intention of many people 
licensing their software under the GPL. If I license my code under the 
pure GPL, I don't want it to be linked against proprietary libraries 
(including the commercial edition of Qt).

We have mechanisms to overcome this problem, one is using the LGPL for 
our own libraries and the other is to add the Qt exception to the GPL 
for the application code which is meant to run with the commercial Qt 
version. This works well and respects the intentions of the authors of 
the software.

For kdepim in particular the license problem is almost solved. I don't 
think that licensing is a relevant obstacle for a Windows version of 
Kontact. Somebody just has to do the remaining work and finish the 
port.

Maybe it's time for a "KDE for Windows" initiative.

-- 
Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher@kde.org>
 
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