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Removing CLA isn't exactly simple. Trolltech/Nokia has for long offered an commercial and closed source versio of Qt to those who are willing to pay. Nokia sold this business to Digia not long ago. Trolltech/Nokia has also many times said that they can't remove the CLA for legal reasons - most likely refering to the agreements that have been made in the past.
Next time inform yourself about contractual obligations only covering one major version and BSD licenses as alternative option to allow proprietary versions.
I never said that possible legal problems end in agreements made with licensee of Qt commercial.
"As a last point I wanted to talk about one thing that is fixed for the project and not going to go away. To contribute to Qt, you will have to sign a Contribution License Agreement with Nokia. We have put a lot of effort keeping the Qt codebase legally clear and clean, and this attention to detail will continue under the Qt Project. We have been over the last months reviewed the CLA extensively with many stakeholders and believe we have a solution that is as inclusive as possible for all companies and individuals that want to contribute to Qt. The CLA also enables the commercial ecosystem around Qt to continue to thrive and contribute to the project. Further, there are a number of legal obligations from Trolltech and Nokia that have to be taken into account."
By stating something that's actually true? I thought from reading your critique towards Nokia's use of the word "open governance" that you take meanings of words seriously.
As long as it is released under the GPL, obviously yes.
Qt is actually licensed under the LGPL, which does not require a closed source application developer to get a developer license from Digia unless you do not wish to comply with the terms of the LGPL.
Soooo..
If you wanted to make a closed source commercial app using QT, would you still need a developers license?
Qt is currently either commercially licenced as LGPL. IIRC your app would need to be dynamically linked against Qt and you would have to be provide the Qt Sources (and only the Qt Sources) on request.
Whenever the shit hits the fan, this thing can be forked.
It can be forked right now, but then you wouldn't get the Nokia's paid development for free. Hey that sound familiar, when looked upon from the other side.
I bet all you negative posters scored a high emotional function score at the Rorschach test
I never said that possible legal problems end in agreements made with licensee of Qt commercial.
"As a last point I wanted to talk about one thing that is fixed for the project and not going to go away. To contribute to Qt, you will have to sign a Contribution License Agreement with Nokia. We have put a lot of effort keeping the Qt codebase legally clear and clean, and this attention to detail will continue under the Qt Project. We have been over the last months reviewed the CLA extensively with many stakeholders and believe we have a solution that is as inclusive as possible for all companies and individuals that want to contribute to Qt. The CLA also enables the commercial ecosystem around Qt to continue to thrive and contribute to the project. Further, there are a number of legal obligations from Trolltech and Nokia that have to be taken into account."
I'm aware of that blog post but aside the unspecific claim ?there are legal obligations? no details are given. If Qt was actually under ?open governance?, those obligations were made public to openly review them.
As I already wrote: I'm aware of the obligations for Qt 4.x as commercial support contracts guaranty the possibility of closed source releases for the timespan of a Qt generation. But as I also wrote: Qt 5 would be a new generation and that would free Nokia from those obligations.
Aside from the obvious scam that potential contributors give more rights to Nokia than contributors have themselves, there are a number of additional problems with that CLA.
I give one example: Let?s say ? hypothetically ? that the Mozilla?s new Azure graphics was so awesome it would make perfect sense to port it to Qt and use it there. In actual LGPLed community projects that would be no problem. In Qt that?s not possible because the CLA forbids it.
Everybody bitches against NIH syndrome ? eg when GNOME people are too proud or whatever to implement KDE?s StatusNotifier protocol.
Now even under ?open governance? NIH syndrome is still mandated by Qt.
Everybody bitches against NIH syndrome ? eg when GNOME people are too proud or whatever to implement KDE?s StatusNotifier protocol.
Now even under ?open governance? NIH syndrome is still mandated by Qt.
They accepted Phonon from KDE and maybe something else, too. Even if Gnome and Qt suffer from the NIH syndrome KDE doesn't. If there will be something wrong with Qt and Nokia in the future it can be always forked. At this point they're playing well.
They accepted Phonon from KDE and maybe something else, too.
That ?something else? is WebKit. But those are separate modules. In fact Qt?s old web renderer is still maintained as an option for owners of the commercial license (at least in Qt 4.x).
Phonon was a short experiment. It is deprecated now and replaced by QtMultimedia which can be made proprietary again.
As long as Nokia maintains its CLA, ?foreign? LGPLed code cannot be imported into QtCore, QtDeclarative, or QtGui.
Nokia in turn can to whatever it wants with Qt code, incl. incorporating it into proprietary software for the ?beloved? WP7.
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