samba license change

Alan Cox alan at redhat.com
Wed Oct 10 15:55:19 UTC 2007


On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 05:00:36PM +0200, Olivier Galibert wrote:
> > I must say I'm sorry to step into this flamefest, but weren't the QT 
> > licensing issues the reasons why we have gnome in the first place?
> 
> That was the #1 reason, when Qt's license was not DFSG-compliant.  I
> suspect #2 and #3 were "me no likee C++" and "RedHat needs to have
> something different vs. what Suse does".  Without #2 and #3 the

There were several reasons I can remember
	- Qt was non free, so KDE was non free  (long fixed)
	- A desktop built on a "pay to play" licence would strange 
	  future uptake (as Motif did for Unix)
	- Gnome was doing lots of cool stuff even by the point we got
	  properly involved.
	- There were patents around Qt and troll tech strongly implied they
	  attack the Qt cloning work if it ever succeeded.

Since then Troll Tech have refined the Qt licence somewhat, allowed GPL use
of it clearly, set up the foundation to protect its future if bad things
occur, and done lots of cool stuff with it. Still has issues for non-free
software that Gnome does not - that however is by design 8)

Alan




More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list