> On 13 Jan 2015, at 23:04, Dennis E. Hamilton <dennis.hamil...@acm.org> wrote: > > I think the licensing situation is very clear. > > There are two licensing arrangements. > > The free license is standard GPL3/LGPL3. > > There is a commercial license for proprietary, closed source work. That > license has to be purchased and there are flavors of it, such as Indie > Mobile, Professional, Enterprise, Device Creation, Cloud Services, etc. > These do not qualify as open-source licenses. > > Here's the fee structure along with the license flavors: > <http://www.qt.io/download/>. > > - Dennis > > PS: I thought there was a LGPL case where you could run QT as a DLL > underneath an application, but I don't see how that can work with an ASF > Project for a number of reasons. I also don't see anything about that > featured in the current materials (although Wikipedia points to the Digia QT > LGPL Exception, which is at the bottom of this page: > <http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/lgpl.html#digia-qt-lgpl-exception-version-1-1>. > Some of the gyrations may be related to how QT was spun into and out of > Nokia. According to my email archives, I apparently stopped paying attention > to it at the end of 2011. I may also may be thinking of a different project > with regard to using a pre-built DLL and LIB. > >
I think Dennis summarised the point well, However, some more: I had the impression that ASL 2 was compatible with (L)GPL3--but there is some salt here, and it also depends on what you want to infer by “compatible”. Where work would be done on the product using Qt licensed under LGPL or GPL is one issue, and the scope of the work is another. In this case, given the nature of the VCL, the result would probably also be licensed under Qt’s license. However, that does not mean that add-ons, plug-ins, and other such enhancements couldn’t be made using Qt and hosted off-site. And, yes, we’ve had this very discussion before, many times before, *many* times. (And also hosted extensions off-site, with varying licenses, to the annoyance of the FSF.) Originally, the issue preventing use of Qt with OOo was that it forbade free commercial application. Sun didn’t like that as it loved StarOffice. But then Sun sank, OpenOffice got Apache’d and Qt’s license changed (wonder why) and went as Dennis describes it: open and also proprietary. There are some Apache projects that do use Qt, and Qt itself does use ASL2 for some modules. But I think that replacing the longstanding VCL with the popular favourite Qt is not exactly feasible and that there are likely easier alternatives, if we want to change. Is it worth investigating again? I mean not just to reconsider Qt but also VCL. But back to Qt: hope springs eternal, and Qt remains popular, whatever its license and other flaws. I don’t just mean that the Digia exception should give us hope—though why not? Establishing useful compatibility with Apache and for Apache, as well as for users of Qt independent of Apache, would dramatically expand the tool’s usage, I’d guess. Qt’s pages are fairly good, and probably better than my interpretations. Stackoverflow is also good. See: louis > > -----Original Message----- > From: Kay Schenk [mailto:kay.sch...@gmail.com] > Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2015 15:46 > To: OOo Apache > Subject: [DISCUSS] Qt as a replacement for VCL > > Something I started thinking about and ta da...it's been proposed before -- > > http://markmail.org/message/gjvwudqnzejlzynz > > In my mind, we could use some assistance in the maintenance of the > toolkit for our UI instead of continuing to do it ourselves. This said, > I know next to nothing about QT and from what I've seen, the licensing > is pretty complicated and might not work for the ASF -- > > http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/licensing.html#licenses-used-in-qt > > Main web site -- http://qt-project.org/ > > Thoughts? > > -- > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > MzK > > "There's a bit of magic in everything, > and some loss to even things out." > -- Lou Reed > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org
