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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."
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.
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
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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