"Cornelius's grand plan" - Merging KDElibs into Qt

[Zorael]

I'm not a developer but I thought I'd pipe in.

Without really touching on how to technically make kdelibs more
modular and which bits to upstream into Qt (although I like the
{tier1,tier2,platform} divisioning proposed in the wiki), I don't see
how this can be done without /donating/ the code to Nokia to use as
they see fit. Obviously this will allow them to sell the code
commercially, which will alienate developers who submitted code and
patches under GPL, who refuse having their code hijacked in such a
way. That's why we have the GPL to begin with, after all. At the end
of the day, Nokia wants to make money.

See Albert Astals Cid's mail from a few hours ago on what donating in
such a way would necessitate;
> Rewriting all the code in kioslaves contributed by people (like me) that
> don't agree to Qt licensing requirements.

Nevermind rewriting the code. Considering the weight that's put into
hyping the "KDE community", is that really something we'd want to do?

Assuming we upstream cherry-picked bits (kioslave, date convenience
libraries, etc), the only compromise I can see is to get Qt to create
a "QtFree" module that is GPL *only*, into which we submit our stuff.
That way it'd still be upstream, as Qt, making it available to people
on a larger scale - but Nokia can't sell it and developers stay happy.
As far as I understand the GPL, people who want to license Qt
commercially probably can't use these and blend them into their closed
code, though. But that's sort of the point of this compromise; making
it a subsection of Qt that's free and only free.

Obviously "QtKDE" works too. "QtCommunity"? "QtLibre". "QtFreeSeriouslyYouGuys".

Do point out my naïveté.


JR