Re: KDE/Qt and Debian/main
[stuff about dual licensing snipped]
> Also, the GPL is designed specifically to make this sort of licensing
> difficult. The only possible way to do this is to require that the
> person submitting the patch transfer the Copyright to Troll Tech, however
> a great many of people would refuse to do this and you'd have an instant
> fork and fragmentation of Qt. In fact several people were threatening to
> do this before the ink was dry so to speak on the QPL!
Don't get me wrong, I have no intention of telling Troll how they should
license their own work, or run their business...
but let's be a little bit real here.. How many people who submit 'bugfix'
type patches actually apply their _own_ copyright to them? I would say
that almost without exception people are happy to have the code incorporated
into the upstream source.. otherwise they wouldn't submit the patch in the
first place.. if it's significant enough and you happen to get a mention in
the changelog then all the better..
..on the other hand if we are talking about people making *major* additions
to the code.. large enough to acknowledge separate authorship.. then if
Troll Tech wish to make that code non-free also, it seems only fair that
they should come to some agreement with its author.. by their own standard
perhaps even pay some royalty for it..
If they presume to exclusively profit from a right to make contributed code
non-free, then I'd suggest they look again at the Mozilla autopsy. The
level of support they get from the community may not be what they would like
to expect. There doesn't have to be a fork for code to be ignored!
..or maybe I misunderstood your point here?
best,
Ron.
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