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TrollTech Responds To QT Accusations
David B. Harris writes: "On freshmeat.net Erik Eng of Trolltech responds to various accusations thrown at TrollTech about their QT libraries' licensing problems. Set the flame dial to low when you read this one, he seems sincere."
That is one opinion. IMHO it is incorrect.
In that case, you are saying that RMS misunderstands the GPL, as RMS has repeatedly stated that position, and defended it as necessary to prevent the subversion of free software.
The important thing is that GPLed code remain GPLed. The executables are generated by the compiler. What if an OS-provided compiler is used which links in a propietary library without which the program cannot run? It is insane to say that this is wrong.
See this FSF text written by RMS. And point two of this one. And this other one.
It's supposed to be impossible to link a GPLed program to a library that can't be distributed under the terms of the GPL, and it's supposed to be impossible to link a GPLed library to a program that can't be distributed under the terms of the GPL. It was done deliberately. The only exception given was for OS components, and only because it was necessary to allow that in order to make free software available for those OSes.
(Yes, the definition of OS is fuzzy, and one can make the case that Qt is an equivalent of Motif, a system library for the X subsystem of the OS. That addresses this specific case, not the general.)
Steven E. Ehrbar
I agree with this fellow about KDE and such QT-based programs being fully GPL'd. I've read the GPL closely, and it does not make any restrictions of the compilation/linking of a GPL'd program. It DOES restrict non-GPL'd programs from linking with GPL'd libraries/programs, but a -> b does not equal b -> a. Since KDE(a) is linked against QT(b), eveything is good. No proprietary code is linking against a GPL'd program/library. QT is not linking against KDE, so where's the problem? Sure, QT links against LGPL'd libraries, but that's why they're LGPL'd. This license expressely allows proprietary programs to link against an LGPL-licensed program.
However, I this this person should really wake up and just say what everyone knows: They want to make money. They should just admit it. It's their software, and they can do what they want with it. Instead of bitching about it, make another library. Oh, wait, people did - GTK+.
So, just to wrap this up, I'd like to pose you a question. What if someone said that your nice, nifty, Free program, distributed under the GPL, should be proprietary? What if you had hundreds of people downright DEMANDING that you move to a draconian license? You'd be pretty upset, wouldn't you? Because it's your property. It's your blood, sweat, tears, and time. Everyone who is about to flame TrollTech should think about that.
Philippe
P.S.: I have a TrollTech-Free computer.
Among other things, Carter wrote:
The draft license seen by me last before release of the final QPL was GPL compatible. I was proud of it. So, it seemed, was Troll Tech. And then the final license was released, undoing the parts of my work which made the license GPL compatible, but retaining enough to satisfy the definitions of "Free" many distributions (including Debian) use.
But the license issue remains. Qt is not non-free software. But it's not GPL compatible either. Some KDE core developers admit this privately, but won't do so in public because of the implications: that much of KDE is not legally distributable until they contact some people that are damned scarce these days and make the necessary arrangements.
There's a lively debate on that page already.
It's really not TrollTechs job to clean up the licensing mess KDE made. The QPL meets all the requirements of the DFSG just fine. It's KDE which should have thought about the implications of using the GPL. I'm a Debian developer and enthusiastic KDE user and it breaks my heart to see two great projects not coming together because of silly trivialities. And it makes me angry that KDE is still trying to avoid and deny the problem instead expending a tiny amount of energy to fix it once and for all.
It is not illegal by any means to compile and link programs against Qt. The GPL has no restrictions on this.
What it is not legal to do is distribute such programs, because Qt violates one of the terms of the GPL through its discriminatory licensing. It can be made legal again by appending an exception to the GPL.
I develop a GPL'd product for the MacOS which uses PowerPlant, a proprietary toolkit. But my program is perfectly legal to distribute. How, you ask? Because I add the following to the license:
Now, Qt does have a pseudo-Open-Source license, and the code can be distributed (unlike PowerPlant's). This makes a Qt-style exception even easier. In fact, it would take no more than two sentences...
...and all of the licensing isues magically vanish. It really is that simple. Why the KDE team can't swallow their pride and admit that they made a very tiny (and understandable) oversight in their choice of license is beyond me. It's not like it would be that much work; I could do it with a Perl script in five minutes, including the time it takes to write the script. They never struck me as being too arrogant to admit their mistakes; I've seen them do it in the past. If they've kept decent records, they should still have contact information for the developers, not a single one of which would refuse to make the program legally distributable.
Honestly. This issue is so simple, and it can be resolved in a manner that leaves everyone happy, except maybe RMS. What's the big deal about?
It's KDE's developpers that the free software community should be pointing fingers at. One of the main thing advocated by the FSF is to value freedom over convenience and the GPL serves as a legal groundhold to that philosophy.
The problem is that I'm pretty sure a lot of the KDE developpers don't grasp the difference between Free software and Open Source. Why would anyone who understand what they're dealing with choose to put oneself in such a (legal) mess?
Unless of course you're one of the KDE developpers that work for TrollTech. Then, you know it't good for you if every developper that wants to code a GUI app to the GUI's native toolkit has to pay you if they want to develop closed source. It's really that simple yo know. You develop a desktop that depends on you proprietary software and try to make it become a standard on Linux; then you sit tight as you watch the money pouring in.
Wait a sec. If KDE's main developper is working for TrollTech, that make them as guilty as anyone. This is just plain parasitic.
Actually you forgot something else. Companies tend to produce two other good things. :), Visual Studio vs. KDevelop, MSVC or Intel C/C++ vs. GCC, etc. Actually, about the only best in class Open Source software that is widely used is Apache, and maybe Samba.
A) Best in class software. If I have the jingle for it, I am usually much better off buying commercial software because they tend to be superior products. Photoshop vs. GIMP, 3D Studio vs. Blender, Solaris vs. Linux (for my quad proc SPARC box
B) They tend to innovate more. I've yet to see Open Source software that really redifines a market segment or brings something new to the table. All the high profile stuff is essentially a free implementation of stuff that's been done before. KDE is a CDE-workalike. Even though its better, its still nothing new. Same thing for GIMP, Apache, KDevelop, Blender, Gnumeric, Bonobo, KParts, Konqueror. None of these things really have any new features that make you step back and go, "wow, I never expected software could do that!" Even MS induced those feelings the first time you embedded an OLE object into Word. Even something like Berlin, which is pretty nifty, doesn't have anything that's been done before.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I am a lawyer, but this isn't legal advice. If you need legal advice, see an appropriately licensed lawyer.
:)
:)
>>There is nothing illegal about writing GPLed
>>code which uses the Qt API and libraries.
>Writing a derived work from GPLed and QPLed
>source is not the problem or illegal. The
>question is wheter distributing a derived work
>based on a GPLed application and a QPLed library
>is.
No, there's a question even before that--to which the answer is that "KDE is not GPL software."
It may or may not be true that KDE has violated the GPL license of other software by including it within KDE. I don't know (and am not even interested, for that matter
However, it is *not legally possible* for the authors of software to violate their own license. The general claim that "Program XXX violates the GPL" is generally nonsense--a program may violate other licenses that provide material, but the GPL is not some abstract; either it provides the terms for that piece of code, or it does not.
In the case of KDE and several otehr purportedly GPL projects, it does not. These are a class of projects which put out code, call it GPL, but at the same time invite, implicitly or explicitly, people to modify and redistribute--in spite of relying upon (typically) libraries which are not subject to annexation by GPL software.
The action (publication) is inconsistant with the words (GPL), and the law resolves the conflict: the actions govern, and the contract/license is "reformed" in accordance. The software is not GPL, but Quasi-GPL (QGPL).
This doesn't necessarily solve the problem, though. For example, I mentioned above the possibility that GPL software was included in the QGPL software; this could be a problem (offhand, I don't see how it couldn't be). In fact, the various QGPL licenses may be mutually incompatible, depending upon which terms of the GPL must be tossed for each.
Bottom line: release software with an invitation to develop and distribute, proclaiming "GPL" from the treetops, but link to a non-annexable libray, and you land in the land of QGPL, not GPL.
Ugly? Yes. But that's life
hawk, esq.
The article seems to cleam that the distribution is legal, but that does not make it true.
To quote from the editorial:
The QPL version 2.0 will hopefully end the license discussions once and for all and get us all back to coding again.
Not likely, Eirik. Sorry to bear bad tidings. Developers such as these try to do the right thing, but they aren't lawyers, and open source licenses still have yet to be put to the test in the courts, so nobody is really sure how they are going to stand up anyhow. Hell, GPL supporters spend gigabytes arguing over the fine points of the GPL, nevertheless other licenses. So there are no truly effective guidelines to creating an open source license, and "just use the GPL" doesn't work for everyone, nor should it have to.
It seems as though there is a decidedly hostile atmosphere surrounding open source software; when a company decides to open the source to their code, they seem to be opening themselves up to attacks against their business practices by the OSS legions, even when they had no problems when the source was closed! Admittedly, it is a small portion of the open source supporters that do this, but they are quite vocal, and the last thing that a company needs when considering a controversial (within the business community) move like opening the source code to their software, needs is bad press associated with the decision. I am certainly glad that Trolltech was not in this position, as they were already OSS supporters, but even they, after having showed this support for several years, still get flak from the community because there license wasn't written to the critic's specifcations, as if Trolltech was going to announce tomorrow, "Ha, fuck you! We left a nice little loophole in our license, so no more damn source code for you!" Its a wonder that traditionally closed source businesses ever decide to open their source, considering the immense risk, not from hax0rs or competitiors, but from the bad press that can result from the crowing of OSS supporters! It never ceases to amaze me how a bunch of computer geeks suddenly become Harvard law professors just because the law happens to involve software. Give these folks a break, already; sure, their licenses may not be ironclad bastions of open source might, but damn, try to be cool about it! After all, they were cool enough to release the source code to their products, and they sure as hell didn't have to do that, as closed source software seems to sell just fine.
Deo
He compares Qt with Motif:
"When we first released Qt there was already de-facto acceptance in the community that one could make GPLed programs using Motif, even before Lesstiff came along. Motif was a proprietary and non-free library with a much stricter license than Qt."
GPL allows linking (dynamic and static) to libraries that are not GPL compliant if they are considered a part of the OS. Hence, an application in windows that uses WIN32 API has no problems. Qt is not part of the OS on any system, not even Corel Linux.
He also seems to confuse GPL with LGPL:
"If the GPL effectively protected a GPLed library from being used to develop proprietary software, we would allow relicensing Qt under the GPL. But, as I have said, it is not our belief that using a library is making a derivative work. "
The LGPL license was developed to give non GPL compatible software access to GPL libraries. If a library is GPL:ed there is no way of linking (dynamic or static) with that library. E.g. the cygwin library is GPL:ed in Windows, so you can only create GPL:ed software with Cygwin.
Having said all this, Debian could include KDE if they added a clause in KDE that allowed linking to Qt.
This at least is my interpretation of how GPL works.
The main sticking point with the QPL is that it requires all software, even software written written for internal or research purposes, to be released, and to be released under the open source model. Troll Tech's intent is clearly to get every potential commercial user to pay for each of their developers, presumably under the assumption that commercial institutions have lots of money to spend. And at between $1500 and $2400/developer, Qt is (IMO) uncompetitively expensive.
Unlike many other libraries, GUI libraries are complex and require a significant amount of time on the part of the programmer to learn how to use them. So, you should ask yourself: if I invest this much time in the library, what do I get back? With Qt, you commit to either contributing code to Troll Tech (under the QPL) or money (under the commercial license).
If Qt were the only game in town, theremight be some justification for that kind of deal. But there are lots of good, free toolkits and there is no need to make such a tradeoff.
Incidentally, similar considerations apply to GPL'ed GUI libraries. If you invest a lot of time learning a GPL'ed GUI library, you severly limit your options later with what kind of GUI programs you can write. So, I think even placing Qt under the GPL wouldn't help much given the available alternatives. At least the GPL allows internal and research use, however.
Altogether, I doubt Qt is going to make it in the door where I work, and I wouldn't view knowledge of Qt as a big advantage when hiring. My recommendation is: learn GTK/Gnome, Tcl/Tk, wxWindows, FLTK, Java/Swing, even Motif or Win32/MFC.
That said, Troll Tech was in a perfect position to fix them (3-4 clauses changed in their current license would do it) but they chose not to. As soon as Red Hat agreed to ship KDE, they didn't have to worry anymore in their thoughts. The license issues aren't their problem, but they certainly do profit from nobody beliving KDE has a problem.
Read the actual claims made by myself and some of the other Debian people. Don't rely on Slashdot histeria and rumors as to what we think the problem is. Find out what the problems really are - they're a lot simpler in nature and really very clear.
That's interesting, because I see the trend as exactly the opposite.
About a year and a bit ago, with the then new Gimp being a flagship for GTK, things looked very good for Gnome. Then, as I saw it, there was a long period of real or perceived Gnome instability and people started looking at KDE. With KDevelop and KOffice starting to look like more than vapour, KDE seems to me to be on the ascendancy.
TT's business model seems quite straightforward to me. They are writing software that is so good that people will pay for it. However, no matter how good it is, those paying people won't want to use it if no one else does. So, TT creates a userbase by giving it away for free beer to those who wouldn't have paid anyway. However, free beer isn't good enough, because that user base cares about free speech, so TT give it away free beer and free speech, which is still fine because those people still weren't going to pay either way. Net result, TT makes money by selling QT to those who want a very good toolkit, TT gets some OS style help in the form of patches, and TT's paying customers feel good that there are lots of other developers keeping the toolkit popular.
And yes, GTK is a direct threat to this model, and Gnome's success is therefore a threat. This is all fine - it's a perfectly good business model, and no doubt TT will be trying hard to ensure GTKs failure, and no doubt the main way they'll do this is by making QT better and better. Sounds good to me.
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