Okay, you seem to be misunderstanding the meaning of the word "free" as
far as the Linux community is concerned. Maybe you should replace every
occurance of the word "free" with the word "open" to reduce confusion.
Open == GPL. End of story. The GPL is a mutually-advantageous system
that may change the course of human history. (No, I'm not religious
about that at all... :) ) But the point is that Troll has control of Qt
and the "community" doesn't. Troll could change the license on a dime
and leave all you KDE lovers out there with the option to either change
Window Maganers or pay them money. Sure, they probably won't do such a
thing, but they *can* Were QT under GPL, no such thing could occur.
Under the GPL the amount of open ("free") code in the world can only
increase, that's the beauty of it.
Also, I have been told that the licensing of Qt puts some strains on
distribution that I'm not sure about their having been resolved. It
seems (or so I've been informed) that including Qt in a commercial
distribution raises some warning flags legally. Sure, it's not
advantageous for Troll to act on those flags, but what happens once
there is a universal demand for KDE? What's to stop them then?
Now, I personally use KDE as my primary window manager. I really like
it. But I don't like Qt's poilicies and licensing. Now, if you will
excuse me, I think I'm going to go hunt down the FreeQT folks and tell
them what a great job they are doing. (I'd actually offer to help, but I
have too many commercial projects on my desk.)
Joe Pranevich
ps Let's discontinue this thread, shall we? Linux-Kernel is no place to
argue over licensing issues on a window manager toolkit. :) But
*please*, if you spot that I have been misinformed, email me to tell me
about it. Perferably nicely.
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