I agree with you that this page is very misleading. On the one hand, they say "under an open source license" rather than "under the GPL". The page should be clearer that other open source licenses are possible and will stay possible in the future. Advising people not use the QPL in their own code any more is OK, though.
Trolltech can drop neither the GPL nor the QPL from future Qt releases because they are both included the KDE Free Qt Foundation agreement. There have been plans, however, to replace the QPL+GPL dual license with a GPL with special exception, which would be much clearer - something like: "As a special exception, you are also allowed to link to Qt from code that uses other open sources license, provided that all parts of your application are open source licensed."
Another problem is that the agreement only covers the X11 platform. We (that is, KDE people) hope that Trolltech will update it to also include Windows and MacOS.
The Trolltech website also has other problematic pages. For example, they do not always distinguish correctly between "commercial" and "proprietary" in their FAQ.
Qt - and hence KDE - is based on the idea that you can either develop using one of two FOSS licenses (GPL, QPL), or you have to pay the nice people at Trolltech. Note that even other FOSS licenses are in a bind here - the issue isn't just with proprietary software. Both a proprietary app and a BSD-licensed one (for example) would not be able to use the GPL/QPL option.
That's wrong: You can use the BSD license for your own code, even when linking to Qt. Several KDE applications do this. You can also use a large number of other FOSS licenses. The QPL explicitely allows you to link to it from any FOSS license of your choice. Of course you cannot relicense Qt itself - just as you are not allowed to relicense Gtk+ to the BSD license.
You should also note that not every software license is LGPL-compatible. A standard EULA-style license, for example, is incompatible with clause 6 of the LGPL. The commercial Qt license, by contrast, does not force you to include specific terms in your proprietary license.
It is not difficult to write EULAs that are LGPL-compatible, but I strongly advise proprietary software vendors to double-check their software license with a lawyer if they link to Gtk+, kdelibs, or any other LGPL-licensed library. They almost certainly will run into serious legal issues otherwise.
I also strongly advise all free software advocates to focus on positive messages. Negative misinformation will make you and the libraries you advocate look bad. If you are convinced of the quality of the software you advocate, then you have no need to attack or to be afraid of other free software options.
But Qt itself costs around $1780 to $6600 on a per developer basis depending on console/GUI one/two/three platform development. If you work for a company with any clout, you can probably cut that cost in half for either platform. Although I'm not doing anything now, the first thing I would use for a lean startup cross platform development is ACE with wxWidgets on Visual Studio Express or Eclipse with CDT.
As a startup (even without any clout) you can get a 65% discount on your Qt license cost. This means you only need to pay between 556.60 and 1113.00 for a "Desktop Light Edition", which has more features than the other toolkits you mention. The Qt license is valid for your whole lifetime and includes one year of updates and support.
You can use Qt with a number of other open-source licenses as well, for example the Artistic license.
This is possible because Qt is triple licensed (GPL/QPL/proprietary), and the QPL specifically allows to use Qt for any OSI-approved application.
The question is whether the open-source license allows linking against a differently licensed library (like the Artistic license), or if it forbids this (like the GPL).
Under Linux, there are also a number of tools for visually impaired users, some completed, and some in development:
KDE 3.4 includes several large-size, high-contrast themes. Apart from several pre-build colour schemes, the colours can also be adapted to to individual needs. KDE also ships a complete scalable monochrome icon set, that can be automatically coloured in the chosen foreground and background colour.
KDE offers a simple magnifier (KMagnifier) which does not yet handle all the features needed for visually imparied users, but my brother is currently writing a new version using the latest X.org features (to be included with KDE 4).
Blind users can use the screen readers Gnopernicus and Orca. Gnopernicus also offers some magnifaction modes currently not yet implemented in KMagnifier (and vice versa). Support for these assistive technologies will be added to KDE 4.
A great number of console applications can be accessed by a console screen reader like SuSE Blinux, BRASS, or Emacspeak.
Until KDE 4 is released, no ideal Linux solution for partially sighted users exists. For some partially sighted users, the best choice is KDE because of the more flexible colour and theme settings. Other partially sighted users prefer using a console screen reader, or the screen reader and magnifier Gnopernicus, although it does not offer all the magnification modes known from Windows screen magnifiers.
The good news is that in the future, users will be able to use most Linux applications independent of the toolkit, because GNOME and KDE are closely cooperating on defining and standardising a common system for these assistive technologies.
The general tendency is close cooperation between the various projects. No songle project currently offers a complete accessibile solution on Linux, but by combining the different solutions, a lot is possble, and closer cooperation will make even mor ethings possible in the future.
A lot of this cooperation was kicked of at the Unix Accessibility Forum last sumnmer, which the KDE project organised as part of the KDE World Summit.
We are currently busy organising a follow-up event during LinuxTag 2005.
Olaf Schmidt, co-maintainer of the KDE Accessibility Project
For Gnome there is Gnopernicus, easy to install and it works with any GTK app including Firefox.
My experience from talking to blind people is that Gnopernicus is not yet stable enough to compete with the mature console screenreaders that exists for Linux. But experienced users have started to use it successfully, and in one or two years, Gnopernicus might well have evolved into a good everyday tool for blind users.
By then, the application support for it will also have substantially grown: The KDE project is working with the GNOME project to define a common protocol for assistive technologies, so that KDE 4 applications will also work with Gnopernicus.
The KDE Accessibility project is cooperating closely with other accessibility projects (GNOME, SpeechDispatcher,...) to develop common solutions for blind users.
Last August, the KDE project has organized a "Unix Accessibility Forum" as part of the KDE World Summit. Attendees included people from IBM, Novell, Sun Microsystems, Trolltech, BAUM Retec, GNOME, Mozilla, and the Free Standards Group.
In January, there will be another meeting to discuss close cooperation for impaired users, organized by the Free Standards Group.
Some months later, the second Unix Accessibility Forum will take place during LinuxTag.
Re:Firefox GER contains Spyware
on
Firefox News Roundup
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The german version of Firefox 1.0 contains spyware in the ebay-plugin. Search queries are redirected to a data-mining corporation in switzerland.
It seems that the spyware claim is wrong.
After the Heise.de news article was published, there were some responses from Mozilla developers in the German forum linked in the article.
Here is a summary of the facts:
The Swiss company is a contract partner of Ebay.
Ebay gave the Swiss URL to the Mozilla Foundation as a localized link for the search plug-in.
Ebay always forwards search requests to affiliate companies, no matter whether you enter the search keywords in the search plug-in or on the site.
The redirect via the Swiss contract partner of Ebay was the sole decision of Ebay.de. The Mozilla Foundation has no relation to that company. Ebay chose to give direct links for Ebay.com and for all all other Ebay sites.
If you don't trust Ebay's contract partners then you should not use their services. Switching your browser won't help.
The Mozilla Foundation has a contract with Ebay saying that for every Ebay search originating from the search plug-in they get a certain amount of money. This contract is valid for all localizations. The Mozilla developers have no access to any data collected by Ebay or its partners.
The contract between the Ebay and the Mozilla Foundation is interesting, but allegations of spyware are untrue if you know the facts.
My impression is different, but it is impossible to get reliable statistics.
IMO the "OS" is kernel plus the basic tools I mentioned above.
I think it depends on how you are using your computer. For me the most important thing is the desktop I use, because this is what I really work with. To the normal user, a computer running KDE on top of Linux, GNU and X looks and behaves in exactly the same way as one running KDE on top of BSD and X.
The perspective is very different of course once you use the command line tools a lot. For some people, the desktop environment is only a very small part of their desktop experience. For others, this is all they see and deal with.
Linux is great, but we wouldn't get very far without GCC, the binutils, bash, the coreutils (which include chmod, cat, su, ls, tail, and on and on), etc.
Unless you are working in text mode always, you also would not get very far without X and without a window manager / desktop.
This is why I like the abbreviation KGX (Kde/Gnu/linuX/X). Credit where credit is due.
There exists a technical committee at OASIS to make the OpenOffice format a standard (OASIS OpenOffice).
The OASIS format is not simply the OpenOffice format. It contains a number of changes to make sure it works well for other office suits as well.
Two office suits are currently implementing to support OASIS as their native files format: OpenOffice/StarOffice and KOffice. I hope others will join in as well.
Please refer to GNU GPL FAQ: What does it mean to say that two licenses are "compatible"? before reading further.
According to the GNU GPL FAQ linked by you, GPL compatibility means that there is a way of redistributing a combined work under GPL. This is why CeCILL-compatibility of the GPL license is not a requirement for GPL-compatibility of the CeCILL agreement. I will come back to this important point below.
it is a contract, not a license
I agree. But the agreement allows the licensee to relicense the software under the GPL, which is exactly what the FSF defines as GPL-compatibility: "The GPL permits such a combination provided it is released under the GNU GPL. The other license is compatible with the GPL if it permits this too."
Actually it seems to be an illegal contract which violates the European directive on contract law.
If you are European laywer familiar with French copyright law, then please be more specific. Otherwiseit would be nice if you could point me to a respectable web site supporting your accusation.
To be a "compatible license" it must actually be a license.
So how about calling it "GPL compatible license agreement" instead?
the CeCILL only invokes the compatibility clause (5.3.4) "[i]n the event that the Modified or unmodified Software includes code that is subject to the GPL"; i.e.: it itself says that it only attempts to be GNU-GPL-compatible in cases where the original person to put the software under CeCILL included already GNU-GPL-ed software under CeCILL
Wrong. The words "original person" appear nowhere in the license agreement, and you left out the second paragraph of section 5.3.4, which explicitly deals with creating modified software by inserting GPLed code into the software and then redistributing the combined work under the GPL.
because CeCILL puts many additional restrictions (e.g.: on agreement, running the prgram, downloading the program) on the user (even going so far as attempting to remove the user's pre-existing natural rights), regardless of whether it would violate the CeCILL, it would be "violating" the GNU GPL
You are confusing GPL-compatibility of CeCILL license agreement with CeCILL compatibility of the GPL license here. Users of the modified, GPLed software are not subject to the CeCILL license agreement any longer, because they have received all parts of the modified software under the GPL. Only the person creating the combined GPLed work is subject to the CeCILL agreement, which allows creating a modified version of the CeCILL'ed software and releasing it under the GPL.
to link/join/merge exclusively GNU-GPL-ed software with exclusively CeCILL-ed software.
There is no obligation in the CeCILL software agreement to release the modified version under the CeCILL software agreement only, which would indeed violate the GPL.
Software covered by the CeCILL exclusively does not seem to conform to the FSF free-software definition (or the DFSG or the OSD), therefore can never be likned with copylefted (e.g.: GNU-GPL-ed software).
Nonsense. It doesn't matter whether the CeCILL license agreement confirms to the FSF free-software definition, or to any other free-software definition. A non-free license agreement can be GPL-compatible as long as the agreement allows to produce a combined work and to redistribute it under the terms of the GPL.
According to the German Heise.de article, the Sasser author was arrested after someone who knew him contacted Microsoft, showing authentic part of the source code.
Microsoft then called the German police.
they shoulda waited until MS announced a reward for it first!
I am sure the person who called Microsoft was doing this because s/he wanted the reward. Otherwise s/he would have gone directly to the police.
Translated quote from the article:
The first pointer to the writer came from the direct environment of the arrrested. In a phone call to Microsoft a person claimed to know the identity of the Sasser-author. After requests s/he also delivered parts of the source code, which Microsoft categorised as authentic in forensic analysis.
that's why we have things like accessability in the mainstream GNOME (and KDE?)
Accessibility is exactly one of the areas where integration makes a lot of sense. This is why the KDE anhd GNOME accessibilty teams work very closely together, sharing the same library (Sun's ATK). A first snapshot of the work Trolltech is doing to fully integrate Qt/KDE applications with Sun's accessibility framework is already available.
You probably meant this:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=3m&s=SCOX&l=on&z=l &q=l&c=MSFT
Milestone Scientific Inc. (MS) is completely unrelated to both Microsoft Inc (MSFT) and the SCO Group (SCOX).
Contrary to the speculation of Eric Raymond, Microsoft did not orchestrate or participate in the BayStar transaction.
Well, if a Microsoft representative called Baystar from his private phone during a holiday, then it was technically not Microsoft who orchestated this.
I wonder if Microsoft could be sued at all for unfair competition if Bill Gates chose to openly fund SCO shares from his private money?
It seems obvious that SCO's announcement to buy back shares is just another way to raise their stock.
But I doubt that many potential investors will trust this announcement - it is very unspecific with such a two year time span. At least during the version trading hour today, the stock
didn't exactly jump too high up.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you that this page is very misleading. On the one hand, they say "under an open source license" rather than "under the GPL". The page should be clearer that other open source licenses are possible and will stay possible in the future. Advising people not use the QPL in their own code any more is OK, though.
Trolltech can drop neither the GPL nor the QPL from future Qt releases because they are both included the KDE Free Qt Foundation agreement. There have been plans, however, to replace the QPL+GPL dual license with a GPL with special exception, which would be much clearer - something like: "As a special exception, you are also allowed to link to Qt from code that uses other open sources license, provided that all parts of your application are open source licensed."
Another problem is that the agreement only covers the X11 platform. We (that is, KDE people) hope that Trolltech will update it to also include Windows and MacOS.
The Trolltech website also has other problematic pages. For example, they do not always distinguish correctly between "commercial" and "proprietary" in their FAQ.
That's wrong: You can use the BSD license for your own code, even when linking to Qt. Several KDE applications do this. You can also use a large number of other FOSS licenses. The QPL explicitely allows you to link to it from any FOSS license of your choice. Of course you cannot relicense Qt itself - just as you are not allowed to relicense Gtk+ to the BSD license.
You should also note that not every software license is LGPL-compatible. A standard EULA-style license, for example, is incompatible with clause 6 of the LGPL. The commercial Qt license, by contrast, does not force you to include specific terms in your proprietary license.
It is not difficult to write EULAs that are LGPL-compatible, but I strongly advise proprietary software vendors to double-check their software license with a lawyer if they link to Gtk+, kdelibs, or any other LGPL-licensed library. They almost certainly will run into serious legal issues otherwise.
I also strongly advise all free software advocates to focus on positive messages. Negative misinformation will make you and the libraries you advocate look bad. If you are convinced of the quality of the software you advocate, then you have no need to attack or to be afraid of other free software options.
As a startup (even without any clout) you can get a 65% discount on your Qt license cost. This means you only need to pay between 556.60 and 1113.00 for a "Desktop Light Edition", which has more features than the other toolkits you mention. The Qt license is valid for your whole lifetime and includes one year of updates and support.
You can use Qt with a number of other open-source licenses as well, for example the Artistic license.
This is possible because Qt is triple licensed (GPL/QPL/proprietary), and the QPL specifically allows to use Qt for any OSI-approved application.
The question is whether the open-source license allows linking against a differently licensed library (like the Artistic license), or if it forbids this (like the GPL).
No, of course not. But xeyes is actually useful for partially sighted users who have difficulties locating the mouse cursor. Olaf
Under Linux, there are also a number of tools for visually impaired users, some completed, and some in development:
Until KDE 4 is released, no ideal Linux solution for partially sighted users exists. For some partially sighted users, the best choice is KDE because of the more flexible colour and theme settings. Other partially sighted users prefer using a console screen reader, or the screen reader and magnifier Gnopernicus, although it does not offer all the magnification modes known from Windows screen magnifiers.
The good news is that in the future, users will be able to use most Linux applications independent of the toolkit, because GNOME and KDE are closely cooperating on defining and standardising a common system for these assistive technologies.
Olaf Schmidt, KDE Accessibility Project
Accessibility has been the main focus for recent release of KDE.
A few links to relevant pages:
The general tendency is close cooperation between the various projects. No songle project currently offers a complete accessibile solution on Linux, but by combining the different solutions, a lot is possble, and closer cooperation will make even mor ethings possible in the future.
A lot of this cooperation was kicked of at the Unix Accessibility Forum last sumnmer, which the KDE project organised as part of the KDE World Summit.
We are currently busy organising a follow-up event during LinuxTag 2005.
Olaf Schmidt, co-maintainer of the KDE Accessibility Project
My experience from talking to blind people is that Gnopernicus is not yet stable enough to compete with the mature console screenreaders that exists for Linux. But experienced users have started to use it successfully, and in one or two years, Gnopernicus might well have evolved into a good everyday tool for blind users.
By then, the application support for it will also have substantially grown: The KDE project is working with the GNOME project to define a common protocol for assistive technologies, so that KDE 4 applications will also work with Gnopernicus.
The KDE Accessibility project is cooperating closely with other accessibility projects (GNOME, SpeechDispatcher, ...) to develop common solutions for blind users.
Last August, the KDE project has organized a "Unix Accessibility Forum" as part of the KDE World Summit. Attendees included people from IBM, Novell, Sun Microsystems, Trolltech, BAUM Retec, GNOME, Mozilla, and the Free Standards Group.
In January, there will be another meeting to discuss close cooperation for impaired users, organized by the Free Standards Group.
Some months later, the second Unix Accessibility Forum will take place during LinuxTag.
It seems that the spyware claim is wrong.
After the Heise.de news article was published, there were some responses from Mozilla developers in the German forum linked in the article.
Here is a summary of the facts:
The contract between the Ebay and the Mozilla Foundation is interesting, but allegations of spyware are untrue if you know the facts.
My impression is different, but it is impossible to get reliable statistics.
I think it depends on how you are using your computer. For me the most important thing is the desktop I use, because this is what I really work with. To the normal user, a computer running KDE on top of Linux, GNU and X looks and behaves in exactly the same way as one running KDE on top of BSD and X.
The perspective is very different of course once you use the command line tools a lot. For some people, the desktop environment is only a very small part of their desktop experience. For others, this is all they see and deal with.
Unless you are working in text mode always, you also would not get very far without X and without a window manager / desktop.
This is why I like the abbreviation KGX (Kde/Gnu/linuX/X). Credit where credit is due.
The OASIS format is not simply the OpenOffice format. It contains a number of changes to make sure it works well for other office suits as well.
Two office suits are currently implementing to support OASIS as their native files format: OpenOffice/StarOffice and KOffice. I hope others will join in as well.
How will they know the "older man" is not the dad helping his son who is yet to small to go there alone?
According to the GNU GPL FAQ linked by you, GPL compatibility means that there is a way of redistributing a combined work under GPL. This is why CeCILL-compatibility of the GPL license is not a requirement for GPL-compatibility of the CeCILL agreement. I will come back to this important point below.
I agree. But the agreement allows the licensee to relicense the software under the GPL, which is exactly what the FSF defines as GPL-compatibility: "The GPL permits such a combination provided it is released under the GNU GPL. The other license is compatible with the GPL if it permits this too."
If you are European laywer familiar with French copyright law, then please be more specific. Otherwiseit would be nice if you could point me to a respectable web site supporting your accusation.
So how about calling it "GPL compatible license agreement" instead?
Wrong. The words "original person" appear nowhere in the license agreement, and you left out the second paragraph of section 5.3.4, which explicitly deals with creating modified software by inserting GPLed code into the software and then redistributing the combined work under the GPL.
You are confusing GPL-compatibility of CeCILL license agreement with CeCILL compatibility of the GPL license here. Users of the modified, GPLed software are not subject to the CeCILL license agreement any longer, because they have received all parts of the modified software under the GPL. Only the person creating the combined GPLed work is subject to the CeCILL agreement, which allows creating a modified version of the CeCILL'ed software and releasing it under the GPL.
There is no obligation in the CeCILL software agreement to release the modified version under the CeCILL software agreement only, which would indeed violate the GPL.
Nonsense. It doesn't matter whether the CeCILL license agreement confirms to the FSF free-software definition, or to any other free-software definition. A non-free license agreement can be GPL-compatible as long as the agreement allows to produce a combined work and to redistribute it under the terms of the GPL.
This doesn't matter because the CeCILL license says the program can be relicenced under the GPL in paragraph 5.
Microsoft then called the German police.
I am sure the person who called Microsoft was doing this because s/he wanted the reward. Otherwise s/he would have gone directly to the police.
Translated quote from the article:
Try www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.ignalum.com - this is working just fine.
Please stop reporting wrong rumours as facts.
Check Trolltech's site for their board of directors, or search for "Yarro" on their site - and then apologies to them for spreading lies.
That's wrong. The KDE developers have an extra vote in case there is a tie.
See the KDE Free Qt Foundation Announcement for more details.
Accessibility is exactly one of the areas where integration makes a lot of sense. This is why the KDE anhd GNOME accessibilty teams work very closely together, sharing the same library (Sun's ATK). A first snapshot of the work Trolltech is doing to fully integrate Qt/KDE applications with Sun's accessibility framework is already available.
Olaf Jan Schmidt, KDE Accessibility Project
You probably meant this: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=3m&s=SCOX&l=on&z=l &q=l&c=MSFT
Milestone Scientific Inc. (MS) is completely unrelated to both Microsoft Inc (MSFT) and the SCO Group (SCOX).
Well, if a Microsoft representative called Baystar from his private phone during a holiday, then it was technically not Microsoft who orchestated this.
I wonder if Microsoft could be sued at all for unfair competition if Bill Gates chose to openly fund SCO shares from his private money?
It seems obvious that SCO's announcement to buy back shares is just another way to raise their stock. But I doubt that many potential investors will trust this announcement - it is very unspecific with such a two year time span. At least during the version trading hour today, the stock didn't exactly jump too high up.