Re: Qt Freed!
Raul Miller <rdm@test.legislate.com> writes:
> Jim Pick <jim@jimpick.com> wrote:
> > I think that if a lawyer looked at it - he would say the derived work
> > (patch + Qt tarball) still falls under the same license terms as the
> > original work (Qt tarball only).
>
> Sure, but the patch is also a derived work.
>
> I don't think they've thought through the implications of this, yet: You
> can introduce sufficient patches to incorporate the entire functional
> body of Qt's source in the patch, and distribute the patch under the
> license mandated by this license.
>
> At this point, anyone else can do whatever they want with that patch.
>
> This is a loophole even bigger than where they grant permission to
> distribute apps under the terms of the GPL.
Whoa! Big problem. (for Troll Tech)
Somebody could run a script which would double-space the whole source
code. Then the patch would include every line of Troll Tech's stuff.
Since that is under a BSD-ish license, somebody could take that patch
(without the Qt tarball), strip out all the gibberish, and have an
unencumbered version of Qt which could be used in proprietary apps.
Sure, they'd probably get sued - but it does appear to be legal under
the license.
Cheers,
- Jim
Reply to: