Re: Sco vs. IBM

[Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de>]

On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 08:14:55AM -0500, Jesse Pollard wrote:
> On Thursday 19 June 2003 08:03, Martin List-Petersen wrote:
> > Citat Magnus Solvang <magnus@solvang.net>:
> > > Quoting jdow (jdow@earthlink.net):
> > > [...]
> > >
> > > | > I believe it's this Norwegian company they write about:
> > > | >
> > > | > http://www.trolltech.com/
> > > |
> > > | If so then say good by to KDE sometime soon....
> > >
> > > How did you arrive at that conclusion? Do you believe that
> > > SCO will destroy everything and everybody related to Linux
> > > when they can make money by suing them? :)
> > > And KDE is not limited to just Linux.
> >
> > Go back and read the forbes article. That was more or less exactly the
> > point of that article.
> 
> It was the original reason Gnome was started. Trolltec had released thier
> toolkit for "free" but not GPL. They then changed the licence a bit, but I
> think they still have some (lot?) control over the toolkit. I believe the
> KDE group did start a re-work to implement an independant version, but I
> don't know how that went.

That's not correct.

Qt was pulished under the QPL. The QPL is an open source license. The 
only problems was that the QPL is not compatible with the GPL.

There were copyright problems since some small parts of KDE (IIRC e.g. 
kghostview) contain GPL'ed code not written by the KDE developers.

Since version 2.2 Qt is dual-licenced under both the QPL and the GPL 
(you can choose under which license you want to use it.

Trolltech has the same control over Qt as Linus over the Linux kernel.

There's no license reason today why there are two big desktop projects 
(GNOME and KDE).

cu
Adrian

-- 

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed