Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 13th Jul 2005 14:00 UTC, submitted by Timothy R. Butler
Tim Butler knew when he mentioned something negative about the GNU Project's General Public License (GPL), in his column on KDE last week, he would inevitably be accused of arguing the GPL was a bad license. What did not fit into that piece shall now be dealt with: is the GPL a bad license or is the issue he complained about something else?
Thread beginning with comment 3689
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Member since:
2005-07-04
If you consider the money you have to pay to Trolltech for developing proprietary software as a fee for not writing open source software, the dual license scheme makes a lot of sense for the free software community. The Free Software Foundation calls the LGPL Lesser GPL for a reason and they suggest to also use the GPL for libraries.
Furthermore, the money Trolltech earns from selling Qt licenses ensures that Qt stays a worldclass toolkit. Without this money Trolltech could not pay their developers to work on Qt which would also hurt KDE and other free software depending on Qt. I don't think that Qt could be developed at the pace it is developed now without full-time developers payed by Trolltech.
KDE immensly benefited from this and there is absolutely no point rewriting KDE using another toolkit. From a technical point of view this would be a huge step back, there is just nothing that compares to Qt.
That is an excellent point. I think dual-licensing is one of the best ways to fund development. I get my great QT apps I use everyday, Debian et al get to redistribute KDE, developers get an awesome toolkit, and Trolltech and employees get to eat.
MOD this comment up.