On Fri, 3 Dec 2004, Phil Thompson wrote: ... > The key is access to the Qt API. If your applications gives the users access > to the API then those users are developers and need their own licenses. On > the other hand if the API is sufficiently removed from the Qt API then you > shouldn't have a problem. Your API should restrict itself to extending the > capabilities of your application - the more general purpose you make it, the > more you risk a visit from the lawyers.
What about, for example, a XUL processor? Suppose I wanted to rewrite Mozilla's front end to us Qt, I'd clearly need to implement a XUL processor. Obviously such a thing is possible to do with PyQT as well. Would I be able to do such a thing with a standard windows license for Qt and PyQt? Everything I've read suggests that this would not be possible. Users wouldn't have direct access to the Qt API, but they may have access to the aspects Qt system, assuming a XUL type system, including the ability to create new applications with new user interfaces (as one can using Mozilla, XUL and Javascript). ie one could envisage writing a wrapper around every part of the Qt API, and then expose that as an API - is that breaking the rules? I'd assume yes. Suppose then I simply change this to an XML processor (say a tokenising on)that when it gets a directive it simply calls the Qt API, and allow a user to change things in a config file. Is that too far? To me they seem equivalent. I don't tend to use windows much, if ever, and wouldn't want to do this at present. However, it's fairly close to something I would like to do under Linux (where this isn't a problem obviously), fairly close to the wind having read the commercial licenses I could see and it just concerns me that if I ever wanted to port such a system to windows I could get extremely stung (Suppose I was redistributing an executeable). It's a hypothetical question at present, due to using Linux, but it's (realistically) possible at some point it may become less hypothetical. Regards, Michael. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
