Re: Recently released QPL
Joseph Carter wrote:
> Worth noting is that anyone who is going to actually be noticed doing
> free-but-non-free-because-distribution-is-in-house-only is going to be
> big enough that they can afford a Professional license and in that case
> they can also write it off as overhead costs, in which case (at least in
> the US) it can be used to help with taxes and whatnot anyway.
This is Troll Tech's intention and they make no secret of it.
The only problem is that the section in question makes no distinction
between distribution with source and binary only distribution. Here
is the scenario. I work at a company that uses QT and open sourced
software and code snippets for internal development.
They make heavy modifications to KOffice and call that the Company
suite and plaster a copy on each workers machine. Now one of the
workers wants to tweak a section in the Spreadsheet part that isn't
calculating compound interest correctly. The MIS people won't give
him the source code.
This makes the program closed source. Now with my mod ( posted in
another message but badly in need of proper grammar ), he would be able
to call Troll and they could say Mr. MIS person you have 3 choices.
1 : Give your worker source
2 : Give us source
3 : Pay for QT-Pro
As is, option 1 isn't available.
Assuming KOffice is under the GPL Option #1 would solve the problem,
while option 3 doesn't mater to the GPLed work at all.
Because Option #1 doesn't solve your QT violation while it solves
your GPL violation it's an additional restriction.
NOTE : This won't hurt Troll in real life since any company that's
going to stop distribution of software outside the office isn't going
to give the workers full rights to copy and distribute the source
code. Hence a single phrase will make QPL 1.1 GPL compatible and kill
all the sane arguments ( You will still here how badly C++ sucks at
OO development though :)
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