Thank you Andreas Pour
I have been following the KDE/QT licensing issue with concern for over a year
now, and decided to spend the weekend catching up with the last couple months
of the kde-licensing archive. In particular I spent time reading Andreas
Pour's comments and all the replies to them. I also spent some time just
sitting down and rereading the GPL.
I found Andreas' comments to be heart warming as his interpretation of the
GPL closely reflects the spirit in which my contributions to GPLed software
are made.
Thank you very much Andreas for your rigourous analysis of the KDE/QT
situation, especially:
Your GPL interpretation
http://lists.kde.org/?/=kde-licensing&m=94950776505266&w=2
The XFree license comment
http://lists.kde.org/?/=kde-licensing&m=94950776505271&w=2
Personally I would like to see QT issued under a license no more restrictive
than the GPL (or even freer). But I don't regard this as a critical issue,
and in fact consider Troll Tech to be a good example of what a software
company should be like.
I can also see that it is possible that non-KDE developers whose GPLed code
is used in KDE may have a different interpretation of the GPL than Andreas
Pour's preferred one. And that it would be polite (though maybe not legally
necessary) to confirm with them that redistributing their code with KDE is ok
with them.
I think requiring confirmation from those who directly contribute to the KDE
project would be legally unnecessary and well beyond the bounds of sensible
courtesy.
My comments are based on my interpretation of Australian law but are not
legal advice.
BFN,
Don.
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