Re: please use V
Please note: the following is in no way intended as flame
to Bruce, Debian, or the FSF...
bruce@pixar.com (Bruce Perens) writes:
>From: William Burrow <aa126@fan.nb.ca>
>> While the Qt authors may have different concerns than Knuth does over
>> TeX, the idea may be the same: modified versions may reflect badly on
>> Troll Tech.
>
>I understand their concern, I just don't share it. Debian doesn't place
>this sort of restriction on the system. I think I'll encourage people to
>use V - it's GPL-ed and arguing about Qt's license just isn't our job.
For sure, the GPL is great in many respects. Unfortunately,
it doesn't address tumors like Micro$oft that continue to
stunt the growth of computing, and in particular here,
diminish the significance of open standards and freeware.
It's difficult enough to promote freeware in industry with
the common "lack of support" misperception. Combine this
with M$'s current position in the market and in a large
percentage of the corporate and household mind-set. Then
port and donate the same great freeware that runs under
Unix/X11 to the Windows* environment. A highly needed
competitive edge is lost for all that embrace/promote it.
Or, in other words, donating freeware with a GPL doesn't
necessarily help "steer" people to open standards, the FSF
philosophy, etc. the way that it could.
IMHO, a license like Qt's is long overdue. It makes a fine
commercial product available to both X11 and Win32, yet it
provides a great mechanism to promote freeware/open standards
like Unix/X11 *over* propriety ones. Troll's reasoning for
not allowing modified versions may not include this rationale,
but I am certainly tickled pink to see it for this very reason.
Please work with Troll on this -- you may find that there's
no need to "argue" at all.
Tom Julien
tomj@orl.lmco.com
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