Re: SEUL: KDE?

[Jay Bloodworth <jay@pathways.sde.state.sc.us>]

On 16 Jun 1997 jfm2@club-internet.fr wrote:

> KDE is free.  It is even GPLed.  But it is based on the non GPLed Qt
> library.  Programmers can use this library for free as long it is for
> developping free Unix software.  They must pay if they develop
> commercial or non Unix software.  I don't think users of software
> based on KDE must pay for having the shared libs.  This licence is
> very reasonnable but the problem is than one day the authors of Qt (or
> the company having bought their company) can revert this licence (I
> don't think it is possible with GPLed software).  I am no lawyer but I
> don't think they can cancel the licence for an existing version only
> for future releases.
> 

You missed the point.  Regardless of the licensing of KDE, it requires Qt,
which is non-free software.  There are at least two good reasons not to
make SEUL depend on non-free software.

1) Principal: Free software is good.  Supporting free software is good.
If we choose to base SEUL on non-free software, we are choosing not to
support free software.  This is a Bad Thing.

2) Pragmatism: Basing SEUL on non-free software places real restrictions
on how SEUL can be used.  It means that if commercial developers want to
write software for SEUL that uses the 'standard' KDE gui, that must pay
Troll Tech.  Establishing standards and forcing third-party vendors to pay
to implement them may be fine for Microsoft, but I don't believe we should
promote this practice in the Linux community.

Of course, if as you suggest KDE won't be an option for SEUL until 1998,
we may have time to write a free implementation of Qt, which would make
KDE an acceptable option.  FreeQt may happen anyway - there was some
suggestion on the gtk (Gimp tool kit) mailing list of using the Qt API for
the C++ wrapper for gtk.

Jay



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