[1777] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Athena desktop project
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex T Prengel)
Tue May 4 16:45:13 1999
Message-Id: <199905042045.QAA28429@dit>
To: ghudson@MIT.EDU
Cc: alexp@MIT.EDU, source-developers@MIT.EDU, fuzzballs@MIT.EDU,
release-team@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 04 May 1999 16:45:03 EDT
From: Alex T Prengel <alexp@MIT.EDU>
> KDE itself is GPL'd code, but to make
> actual binaries you have to link against the Qt library,
> which is distributed under a no-modifications license not
> compatible with the GPL. At some unspecified date in the
> future, Qt is supposed to be released under the QPL, which
> allows for the distribution of patches along with the
> b,unmodified source. This is still not compatible with the
> GPL. So we couldn't legally distribute KDE binaries.
Well, licensing-wise things may not be so bad as this. the new license
for Qt 2.0 (the QPL, at http://www.troll.no/qpl/annotated.html), is
pretty liberal and most in the Open Source community acknowledge it
as an Open Source license; see sections 4., 5. and 6. in particular.
It looks to me like we wouldn't have trouble with these terms.
> There is a project underway to write a Qt-compatible library
> called "Harmony," but to all appearances it doesn't have a
> lot of steam and isn't anywhere close to there.
From what I've read this is pretty much dead, due in large part to the new
QPL license.
Qt 2.0 is available now in pre-release form (under the QPL) and will
probably be generally available within a couple of months.
Alex
