You cannot make a "copy" (in the legal sense) of trade secrets. Someone/group has the trade secrets or they don't. If they were obtained without the proper owner's consent (i.e. the corporation), then you have stolen them. Trade secrets are valuable precisely because they are secret. Disclosing the secrets actually deprives the owner of the benefit of having them.
Copyright infringement does not cause a direct harm to the owner. Lost revenue is an arguable consequence, but I won't get into that. Stealing trade secrets causes immediate, lasting harm to the owner. It's the same way that stealing my car causing harm to me. Even though the mechanisms of "stealing" are different (making a copy vs. taking a physical item), the owner is deprived of something that had value to him.
My girlfriend is an HR recruiter, and we've spent some time talking about non-competes. In several states, they are specific laws that make them illegal to enforce. Employers can scare you with them, but they can't back them up. California is the most prominent state that does not honor non-competes. Furthermore, in most other states, non-competes are unenforcible. Non-competes are a scare tactic that employers may use against former employees; however, the courts are smart enough to realize that people have to work somewhere, and they might as well be as productive as possible (i.e. work in their qualified field), so they give a lot of deference to people who are trying to work.
Or you could have RTFA and read that older systems will gracefully fall back to the slower implementations. The main purpose of using new OpenGL systems is performance. There's no reason why the slower methods can't be used.
Furthermore, it's also acknowledged that the free drivers won't be supporting OpenGL for another year, at least,
Surprise, there are other people thinking about backwards compatibility than you.
That's sort of what I do, but I would like to watch my DVDs on a dedicated device, which doesn't support ISOs.
I have a 3TB RAID array that I'm just beginning to populate. I rip the full ISO, and then rip the videos (usually TV episodes) into h.264+aac in mp4. I used to use mkv, but it doesn't have good device support. I use a UPnP server on my Linux box to share with my PS3, which works great. Also, mp4 (really m4v) is great for iDevices as well, so I have that flexibility if I want.
I encode with handbrake, which is ok, although I'm not happy with the Linux support. Since it's so Mac-centric, there isn't any support for the most recent release of Gnome (so no distros released after March 2010 work), so I have to run a dev version. I want really high quality encodes. I get pretty much perfect quality from the encodes and they run about 600-800MB/hr for film; animation is all over the place, but quality is good: 280-600MB/hr.
I don't plan to delete the ISOs until my disk space is full. This way if technology changes, then I can still encode from source rather than from another encode.
That being said, I think that h.264 will be around for many years.
Usually consumers will buy based on cost. For Intel, if I have processors A, B, and C priced at $250, $260, and $270, respectively, it doesn't mean that each costs $10 more to produce than the previous one. While at the top-end of performance the margins are huge, they also do weird things in the middle. Intel is probably far better off selling certain processors over others, even though they are all priced similarly. If it happens that higher performing (of course, there's no agreed upon performance "score") chips have lower margins, then Intel has a slight incentive to sell slower ones. I imagine that the performance is pretty similar between the chips in question, and if the model numbers are out of order, then it can confuse the customer enough to maybe buy the higher margin one. It's a delicate balance not to upset the consumer too much and maximize profit, but I think Intel has it pretty easy because people buying boxes from Dell spend about 1 minute choosing their CPU, and they won't ever compare it to another identical (software, malware, etc.) system to notice that 5-10% difference.
Exactly. iPhone upgrades have always been free, so developers only need to target the current major version. iTunes prompts for upgrades whenever one is released, so it would be nonsensical to run an old OS. For iTouches, if someone won't pay for a $5-$10 (I think they are $10) upgrade every six months or so, then as a developer, why should I care about them? If my app is free, then there is no expectation that I spend extra work supporting legacy systems, and if it costs money, then why do I care about the cheapskate who won't buy a very reasonably priced upgrade? People who won't buy upgrades won't pay for apps either.
Apple's commitment to iPhone upgrades is the reason I stick with the platform. Yes, there are things that I'm not happy about, but honestly look at how much the platform has expanded since it was released. I bought a 1st gen iPhone and comparing the features today with when I bought it is really impressive.
You don't need iTunes anymore. On Linux, the libimobiledevice project http://www.libimobiledevice.org/ allows you to sync your iPhone with your favorite Linux app (Amarok, Gtkpod, Rhythmbox, etc.).
I've been a long-time iPhone and Linux user. I was ready to ditch my iPhone this summer, but this project has breathed new life into my iPhone.
Dan Williams, the guy behind Network Manager, does a lot of work to get cellular modems working in Linux. There seems to be lots working and steady process on others. His blog http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/ is informative and frankly pretty hilarious in a geeky way.
I don't know what you're talking about with https://./ I just browsed over to my banking site, and https:/// is in the address. It's even green, and the little padlock is on the right side. My university has an open wireless system that uses a self-signed cert for a logon page. Chrome throws up a big warning. https:/// is in red and is crossed out, not to mention the big warning on the page itself. I'd say that Chrome's alerts about https:/// are perfectly fine.
Exactly. I do tech support at my uni's law school, and I have had about a dozen professors and students come up to me in the last month because they lost a word document (I love finals season...). You know what happened? They opened an attachment, modified it (sometimes for hours), saved (no error messages or anything), and exited. Word happily saved it to a temp folder, and it was never to be found again. No where, not/temp, application data, local settings, etc. That's so stupid that I can't believe Word would do that. But it's not just Word either. Folders suck. I'm a nerd, so all my files are organized, but it's still a pain. I don't like dealing with it.
Users hate file managers.
I just don't see this mattering to the RIAA either on Ubuntu or as a general trend. Talk about knee-jerk reaction.
Every time I read asinine responses about "the good old days" I get more convinced that people are deluded. Society is better in every respect than it was two hundred years ago, get over it.
A comparison between Google and Red Hat doesn't make much sense. Red Hat makes the vast majority of its product completely open source; whereas, Google is very serious about keeping its core products closed. By that I mean, Red Hat open sources the things that make it money, but Google open sources tools that it uses for services that make it money. RHEL is fairly expensive and is a big money maker for Red Hat, and it's not just the sort of "buy support" money either. Google releases several products, Android being the most prominent, that are open source (although small parts of Android are not); however Google doesn't make money directly from Android licenses from end users or device manufacturers. Don't get me wrong, both companies are very important to open source. Red Hat directly open sources most of its products, which benefit the Linux community tremendously, and Google open sources some platforms (like Android, Chrome OS, Chrome, etc.) and some tools that are important. I just don't think that the two are comparable. Lumping them in the same open source group is not appropriate, and I think this is important when examining financial profitability. Google's profitability from open source is cake icing for them. There's probably not a whole lot that they expect from open source. Take Android for example. No matter the OS, device manufacturers would have access to the source code, so it's not an issue to them. And I doubt they would get many submissions from the manufacturers anyways unless they were obligated, which they are not under the Android license (some BSD-style license); there are probably not a ton of submissions from the "community" either. Kernel submissions would be the most like IMO, and Google is working to merge Android with the Linux kernel (forked around 2.6.18 I believe). Basically, Google doesn't benefit a significant amount from open source. It doesn't really affect their bottom line, which is largely the ad business. Red Hat, on the other hand, has to make money directly from open source. Projects like CentOS and OEL (Oracle Enterprise Linux) are direct threats to Red Hat's profitability. That's not to say they are bad or anything, but they certainly do have an effect on Red Hat's ability to make money. Red Hat is far more dependent on open source, and if you look at contributions, open source development (mostly Linux, but also OS independent projects like Gnome) is very dependent on Red Hat.
In the end, both companies, and all the others that support open source, are great. However, it's unfair to categorize companies that release open source products that depend of those products for their revenue and those that get revenue largely from other areas.
Seriously, how many stories are needed on this topic? It was a very minor, localized issue that has already been dealt with in a manner that has garnered almost universal Slashdot love; stories over, nothing to see here.
I notice a lot of people will have Firefox installed, but sometimes still use IE. I admit it to it (in the few times that I'm using Win); if I'm just searching something simple, and IE is close, then I use it. Yeah, it sucks, but sometimes it's not a BFD. That being said, I doubt usage like that counts for much in these stats.
Linux is my primary platform, and I've given up completely on FF*. It takes way too long to open, and while Chrome and FF are both GTK+ apps, FF looks particularly like shit in KDE. I think that the blue title bar and text highlighting colors are fantastic; I feel like a bug being drawn towards the light.
* For legacy reasons, there are certain instances when I *have* to use FF. BMC Remedy can be fussy with Chrome some times, and there's a few other situations that I've noticed. How crazy is that, I have to use FF as a *legacy* browser?!
This is true, but it's really easy to get around it. Let's say that car X rear-ends me (I'm car Y), and I get pushed into Z. I'm at fault for hitting Z; however, I sue (which will just be settled, no court) X for the damages of Y and Z. It's kind of a pain that I have to be the middleman to "distribute" the settlement, but I don't loose any money.
...then it is going to go the same way as the whole US software industry - it will disappear into a black hole of law suits and legal action and very quickly become irrelevant.
It's not like all major operating systems are developed in the US (Windows, Mac, Linux -- US corporations are the primary workers on the kernel, Red Hat, Novell, Oracle, Linus lives in the US). Adobe is based in the US. I'm trying to think of other large software companies that exist completely outside the US, and I'm coming up blank. KDE is the best one that I can think of at the moment (KDE e.V. is German-based).
For all the stink that people make about software patents, they really aren't used very much. There has been all the cellphone lawsuits lately, but that's not normal.
I think that if Mozilla would sit down with MPEG-LA they could get a really good license (i.e. no cost). The bigger issue is complying with the GPL. I hope they can work something out because theora is simply inferior to h.264.
I think that there are patent concerns about theora. While the creators do not hold patents on it, that certainly does not mean that there are no patents on it. That's a very large danger. Google may have to spend $5M for Chrome to support h.264, but if they use Theora and there is a submarine patent, then they will be paying way more than $5M. With H.264, MPEG-LA will be defending those suits, and I'm sure in the licensing terms they guarantee that they are the only body that holds the patents. That basically gives a corporation insurance against patent suits.
That's not the way things work. Everything I create is automatically copyrighted to me. In fact, it takes quite a bit of work (in the form of a notice in the work) to remove copyright from a work. That's one huge difference between copyright law and patent/trademark law. Copyright is automatic (although you can "register" works to get additional protections), whereas patents/trademarks take a lot of work to be granted.
I would argue that they didn't seek any "protection" for these works because they were never published, so there was nothing that needed defending.
Let's say I want to keep a private journal that I never want released (and also assume that I --or more likely my estate -- outlives the length of the copyright, and hence has a reason to care). Under your logic, I'm totally screwed. 1) If I don't seek "protection" under copyright, then a thief could break into my home, steal the journal, and then publish it (assuming that they made a copy before they lost the original from court sanctions) without consequence (duly noting the unrelated jail time for b&e and theft). I'm screwed because my private journal gets out, and I can't use the court system to stop people from spreading it. 2) If I do seek "protection," then some jackoff can force me (more likely my estate) to produce the journal once the copyright expires. Again, I'm screwed because people have access to my private stuff.
I understand that copyright is two sided: government gives protection for a period of time, but once it's gone, it's gone. However, your argument is weak because every creative work is automatically copyrighted, and our law inherently assumes that to every thing an owner.
The thing is that they never distributed them. That's like saying that Abraham Lincoln's estate is legally required to make all of his private journals available to you.
I agree that's its a dick move to keep these works locked up, but I think that it would be dangerous to Force people to make their out-of-copyright works available. Copyright provides powerful tools to entities to control their creative works, but some protection is needed afterwards. If I created something privately, then no one should be able to compel me to release just because its copyright is up. Yes, if they have a copy of the work, then they are free to do what they want with it. It's sort of like the GPL; you don't have to opensource your changes, unless you distribute it. If you keep it private, then it's fine. That's how I feel about this; if they want to keep it private, that's fine.
Again, I wouldn't do the same thing if I were in their position, but I certainly understand why they do it.
Nokia aquired QT about a year ago, and Nokia has added more free licenses (LGPL). I think that Nokia has done a tremendous job keeping QT free. It's available under the LGPL now; the most recent release, 4.6, saw the first community submissions. They are also a "KDE Patron."
Slashdot Mirror
You cannot make a "copy" (in the legal sense) of trade secrets. Someone/group has the trade secrets or they don't. If they were obtained without the proper owner's consent (i.e. the corporation), then you have stolen them. Trade secrets are valuable precisely because they are secret. Disclosing the secrets actually deprives the owner of the benefit of having them.
Copyright infringement does not cause a direct harm to the owner. Lost revenue is an arguable consequence, but I won't get into that.
Stealing trade secrets causes immediate, lasting harm to the owner. It's the same way that stealing my car causing harm to me. Even though the mechanisms of "stealing" are different (making a copy vs. taking a physical item), the owner is deprived of something that had value to him.
My girlfriend is an HR recruiter, and we've spent some time talking about non-competes. In several states, they are specific laws that make them illegal to enforce. Employers can scare you with them, but they can't back them up. California is the most prominent state that does not honor non-competes. Furthermore, in most other states, non-competes are unenforcible.
Non-competes are a scare tactic that employers may use against former employees; however, the courts are smart enough to realize that people have to work somewhere, and they might as well be as productive as possible (i.e. work in their qualified field), so they give a lot of deference to people who are trying to work.
Or you could have RTFA and read that older systems will gracefully fall back to the slower implementations. The main purpose of using new OpenGL systems is performance. There's no reason why the slower methods can't be used.
Furthermore, it's also acknowledged that the free drivers won't be supporting OpenGL for another year, at least,
Surprise, there are other people thinking about backwards compatibility than you.
That's sort of what I do, but I would like to watch my DVDs on a dedicated device, which doesn't support ISOs.
I have a 3TB RAID array that I'm just beginning to populate. I rip the full ISO, and then rip the videos (usually TV episodes) into h.264+aac in mp4. I used to use mkv, but it doesn't have good device support. I use a UPnP server on my Linux box to share with my PS3, which works great. Also, mp4 (really m4v) is great for iDevices as well, so I have that flexibility if I want.
I encode with handbrake, which is ok, although I'm not happy with the Linux support. Since it's so Mac-centric, there isn't any support for the most recent release of Gnome (so no distros released after March 2010 work), so I have to run a dev version. I want really high quality encodes. I get pretty much perfect quality from the encodes and they run about 600-800MB/hr for film; animation is all over the place, but quality is good: 280-600MB/hr.
I don't plan to delete the ISOs until my disk space is full. This way if technology changes, then I can still encode from source rather than from another encode.
That being said, I think that h.264 will be around for many years.
Usually consumers will buy based on cost. For Intel, if I have processors A, B, and C priced at $250, $260, and $270, respectively, it doesn't mean that each costs $10 more to produce than the previous one. While at the top-end of performance the margins are huge, they also do weird things in the middle. Intel is probably far better off selling certain processors over others, even though they are all priced similarly. If it happens that higher performing (of course, there's no agreed upon performance "score") chips have lower margins, then Intel has a slight incentive to sell slower ones.
I imagine that the performance is pretty similar between the chips in question, and if the model numbers are out of order, then it can confuse the customer enough to maybe buy the higher margin one.
It's a delicate balance not to upset the consumer too much and maximize profit, but I think Intel has it pretty easy because people buying boxes from Dell spend about 1 minute choosing their CPU, and they won't ever compare it to another identical (software, malware, etc.) system to notice that 5-10% difference.
Exactly. iPhone upgrades have always been free, so developers only need to target the current major version. iTunes prompts for upgrades whenever one is released, so it would be nonsensical to run an old OS. For iTouches, if someone won't pay for a $5-$10 (I think they are $10) upgrade every six months or so, then as a developer, why should I care about them? If my app is free, then there is no expectation that I spend extra work supporting legacy systems, and if it costs money, then why do I care about the cheapskate who won't buy a very reasonably priced upgrade? People who won't buy upgrades won't pay for apps either.
Apple's commitment to iPhone upgrades is the reason I stick with the platform. Yes, there are things that I'm not happy about, but honestly look at how much the platform has expanded since it was released. I bought a 1st gen iPhone and comparing the features today with when I bought it is really impressive.
You don't need iTunes anymore. On Linux, the libimobiledevice project http://www.libimobiledevice.org/ allows you to sync your iPhone with your favorite Linux app (Amarok, Gtkpod, Rhythmbox, etc.).
I've been a long-time iPhone and Linux user. I was ready to ditch my iPhone this summer, but this project has breathed new life into my iPhone.
Dan Williams, the guy behind Network Manager, does a lot of work to get cellular modems working in Linux. There seems to be lots working and steady process on others.
His blog http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/ is informative and frankly pretty hilarious in a geeky way.
Props to Dan for doing a great job.
I don't know what you're talking about with https://./ I just browsed over to my banking site, and https:/// is in the address. It's even green, and the little padlock is on the right side.
My university has an open wireless system that uses a self-signed cert for a logon page. Chrome throws up a big warning. https:/// is in red and is crossed out, not to mention the big warning on the page itself.
I'd say that Chrome's alerts about https:/// are perfectly fine.
Version 5.0.375.38
Exactly. I do tech support at my uni's law school, and I have had about a dozen professors and students come up to me in the last month because they lost a word document (I love finals season...). You know what happened? They opened an attachment, modified it (sometimes for hours), saved (no error messages or anything), and exited. Word happily saved it to a temp folder, and it was never to be found again. No where, not /temp, application data, local settings, etc. That's so stupid that I can't believe Word would do that.
But it's not just Word either. Folders suck. I'm a nerd, so all my files are organized, but it's still a pain. I don't like dealing with it.
Users hate file managers.
I just don't see this mattering to the RIAA either on Ubuntu or as a general trend. Talk about knee-jerk reaction.
Every time I read asinine responses about "the good old days" I get more convinced that people are deluded. Society is better in every respect than it was two hundred years ago, get over it.
A comparison between Google and Red Hat doesn't make much sense. Red Hat makes the vast majority of its product completely open source; whereas, Google is very serious about keeping its core products closed. By that I mean, Red Hat open sources the things that make it money, but Google open sources tools that it uses for services that make it money. RHEL is fairly expensive and is a big money maker for Red Hat, and it's not just the sort of "buy support" money either. Google releases several products, Android being the most prominent, that are open source (although small parts of Android are not); however Google doesn't make money directly from Android licenses from end users or device manufacturers.
Don't get me wrong, both companies are very important to open source. Red Hat directly open sources most of its products, which benefit the Linux community tremendously, and Google open sources some platforms (like Android, Chrome OS, Chrome, etc.) and some tools that are important. I just don't think that the two are comparable. Lumping them in the same open source group is not appropriate, and I think this is important when examining financial profitability.
Google's profitability from open source is cake icing for them. There's probably not a whole lot that they expect from open source. Take Android for example. No matter the OS, device manufacturers would have access to the source code, so it's not an issue to them. And I doubt they would get many submissions from the manufacturers anyways unless they were obligated, which they are not under the Android license (some BSD-style license); there are probably not a ton of submissions from the "community" either. Kernel submissions would be the most like IMO, and Google is working to merge Android with the Linux kernel (forked around 2.6.18 I believe). Basically, Google doesn't benefit a significant amount from open source. It doesn't really affect their bottom line, which is largely the ad business.
Red Hat, on the other hand, has to make money directly from open source. Projects like CentOS and OEL (Oracle Enterprise Linux) are direct threats to Red Hat's profitability. That's not to say they are bad or anything, but they certainly do have an effect on Red Hat's ability to make money. Red Hat is far more dependent on open source, and if you look at contributions, open source development (mostly Linux, but also OS independent projects like Gnome) is very dependent on Red Hat.
In the end, both companies, and all the others that support open source, are great. However, it's unfair to categorize companies that release open source products that depend of those products for their revenue and those that get revenue largely from other areas.
Well said. This is the entire purpose of regulation. Mod parent up.
Seriously, how many stories are needed on this topic? It was a very minor, localized issue that has already been dealt with in a manner that has garnered almost universal Slashdot love; stories over, nothing to see here.
The original story linked to a youtube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDU7Xoju4LM that showed a buyer "unboxing" the fake processor.
The use of "in toto" is in toto-ly stupid. This is not a legal paper, so don't use Latin. "Completely" would have sufficed.
I notice a lot of people will have Firefox installed, but sometimes still use IE. I admit it to it (in the few times that I'm using Win); if I'm just searching something simple, and IE is close, then I use it. Yeah, it sucks, but sometimes it's not a BFD. That being said, I doubt usage like that counts for much in these stats.
Linux is my primary platform, and I've given up completely on FF*. It takes way too long to open, and while Chrome and FF are both GTK+ apps, FF looks particularly like shit in KDE. I think that the blue title bar and text highlighting colors are fantastic; I feel like a bug being drawn towards the light.
* For legacy reasons, there are certain instances when I *have* to use FF. BMC Remedy can be fussy with Chrome some times, and there's a few other situations that I've noticed. How crazy is that, I have to use FF as a *legacy* browser?!
Dammit, I wrote loose instead of lose. I feel like a moron...
This is true, but it's really easy to get around it. Let's say that car X rear-ends me (I'm car Y), and I get pushed into Z. I'm at fault for hitting Z; however, I sue (which will just be settled, no court) X for the damages of Y and Z. It's kind of a pain that I have to be the middleman to "distribute" the settlement, but I don't loose any money.
Sorry to reply to my own post...
geohot.com (where the exploit is actually hosted) registered to godaddy.com --> USA
Takedown notice in 3, 2, 1...
pastie.org: registered in KY, USA
blogspot.com registered in CA, USA
Canada is the principle trading partner of the US. We also have fantastic relations with them, disproving your entire point. http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/top/dst/current/balance.html
...then it is going to go the same way as the whole US software industry - it will disappear into a black hole of law suits and legal action and very quickly become irrelevant.
It's not like all major operating systems are developed in the US (Windows, Mac, Linux -- US corporations are the primary workers on the kernel, Red Hat, Novell, Oracle, Linus lives in the US). Adobe is based in the US. I'm trying to think of other large software companies that exist completely outside the US, and I'm coming up blank. KDE is the best one that I can think of at the moment (KDE e.V. is German-based).
For all the stink that people make about software patents, they really aren't used very much. There has been all the cellphone lawsuits lately, but that's not normal.
I think that if Mozilla would sit down with MPEG-LA they could get a really good license (i.e. no cost). The bigger issue is complying with the GPL. I hope they can work something out because theora is simply inferior to h.264.
I think that there are patent concerns about theora. While the creators do not hold patents on it, that certainly does not mean that there are no patents on it. That's a very large danger. Google may have to spend $5M for Chrome to support h.264, but if they use Theora and there is a submarine patent, then they will be paying way more than $5M. With H.264, MPEG-LA will be defending those suits, and I'm sure in the licensing terms they guarantee that they are the only body that holds the patents. That basically gives a corporation insurance against patent suits.
That's not the way things work. Everything I create is automatically copyrighted to me. In fact, it takes quite a bit of work (in the form of a notice in the work) to remove copyright from a work. That's one huge difference between copyright law and patent/trademark law. Copyright is automatic (although you can "register" works to get additional protections), whereas patents/trademarks take a lot of work to be granted.
I would argue that they didn't seek any "protection" for these works because they were never published, so there was nothing that needed defending.
Let's say I want to keep a private journal that I never want released (and also assume that I --or more likely my estate -- outlives the length of the copyright, and hence has a reason to care). Under your logic, I'm totally screwed.
1) If I don't seek "protection" under copyright, then a thief could break into my home, steal the journal, and then publish it (assuming that they made a copy before they lost the original from court sanctions) without consequence (duly noting the unrelated jail time for b&e and theft). I'm screwed because my private journal gets out, and I can't use the court system to stop people from spreading it.
2) If I do seek "protection," then some jackoff can force me (more likely my estate) to produce the journal once the copyright expires. Again, I'm screwed because people have access to my private stuff.
I understand that copyright is two sided: government gives protection for a period of time, but once it's gone, it's gone. However, your argument is weak because every creative work is automatically copyrighted, and our law inherently assumes that to every thing an owner.
The thing is that they never distributed them. That's like saying that Abraham Lincoln's estate is legally required to make all of his private journals available to you.
I agree that's its a dick move to keep these works locked up, but I think that it would be dangerous to Force people to make their out-of-copyright works available. Copyright provides powerful tools to entities to control their creative works, but some protection is needed afterwards. If I created something privately, then no one should be able to compel me to release just because its copyright is up. Yes, if they have a copy of the work, then they are free to do what they want with it. It's sort of like the GPL; you don't have to opensource your changes, unless you distribute it. If you keep it private, then it's fine. That's how I feel about this; if they want to keep it private, that's fine.
Again, I wouldn't do the same thing if I were in their position, but I certainly understand why they do it.
Nokia aquired QT about a year ago, and Nokia has added more free licenses (LGPL). I think that Nokia has done a tremendous job keeping QT free. It's available under the LGPL now; the most recent release, 4.6, saw the first community submissions. They are also a "KDE Patron."
Nokia does open source right.