[Kde-windows] general question about compiler support

[Jarosław Staniek]

Ralf Habacker said the following, On 2005-10-20 10:21:

> Currently minge is the only official supported  gpl distribution of QT4 and 
> this is why I have started to add mingw support to bksys to create gpl'ed 
> KDE4 applications on windows, 
> 
> What about msvc, there is currently no official distribution, only the support 
> Christian Ehrlicher does adding the msvc build system to QT4 and Jaruslav has 
> probably a commercial QT4 license. 

Nope, doing this (partially) outside of the company I work with, I'am using 
GPL license for this.

> The questions i have are what does this mean related to licensing and support 
> issues. 
> 
> - Who will give qt4 support for msvc in the future, when many people are using 
> this and have questions and problems with the commercial and non-official 
> release, because trolltech will not do that. 

The same answer as with gcc or any other tool: Users of msvc will be most 
likely offer (limited) support for it.

It seems to be natural that FOSS devs and/oir users are asked from time to 
time with "what about support" question. Hint: there are companies or other 
organizations that having software commodized by pushing FOSS, are happy to 
provide support instead fo pushing paid updates. It's an ecosystem that, we 
can hope, will evolve for win32 target too.

> - Who will give support for the produced KDE applications, if only a very 
> limited public community is possible for the commercial and non-official 
> release ? 

All can vary from app to app. Quite similar question to "how to ensure app XYZ 
is well packaged in all Linux distros" - nobody can ensure this. Also similar 
question to "how to ensure Qt-only app is maintained on win32. Let's note 
again, we're not mirroring KDE desktop (in term of set of apps) on win32, but 
KDE framework.

> - How could a gpl'ed KDE application released with a commercial qt library 
> without the source ? 

If the application if LGPL-ed, it's OK. If it's GPL-ed, it's needed to receive 
written permission (called GPL exception for building using non-GPL tool) from 
every author.

Example: KBabel in 2004:
http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kbabel/2004-November/000502.html
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-commits&m=112795085124460&w=2

> This is not to hurd anyone or  to discredit anyones work, but a real important 
> question resulting from my own experience with trolltech layers relating to 
> the QT3 port.  

OK, thanks.

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam,
  Jaroslaw Staniek / OpenOffice Polska
  Kexi Developer:
      http://www.kexi-project.org | http://koffice.org/kexi
  KDE3, KDE4 libraries for developing MS Windows applications:
      http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDElibs+for+win32