Re: Status of KDE/Qt - interim decision

[Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>]

> David Welton writes:
> > For the same reasons [ or list them ] cited in
> > http://www.redhat.com/redhat/qtlicense.html, Debian has decided to pull
> > Qt, the KDE binaries, as well as other GPL'ed software that suffers from
> > the same type of legal problems from our FTP sites.
> 
> I'm aware of no legal problems with Qt.  It's non-free, sure, but so is
> everything else in non-free.  Why pick on Qt?  It isn't Troll Tech's fault
> that the KDE authors are careless about copyright.

Except that their licence is almost equally sloppy, in that it mentions the
GPL as one of three possible licence options to use.

Since the GPL is incompatible with Troll's license, a clause within that 
license encouraging the use of the GPL for code linked against Qt, is 
somewhere between foolish and disingenuous.

Also, it wouldn't surprise me too much if it invalidates the Qt licence
(invalid clauses in contracts have a tendency to do that)

BTW  I'm not arguing that we should throw Qt out of non-free.  I just wanted 
to point out that Troll have been pretty stupid with their licence too.

Cheers, Phil.