Mandrake 7.0 ( for integrated debugger ) - AND - legal question

Jerry L Kreps JerryKreps at alltel.net
Sun Feb 13 13:44:40 GMT 2000


Bernd Gehrmann wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 12 Feb 2000, Jerry L Kreps wrote:
> > as long as your don't  sell or give your binaries to a third
> > party you can use GPL tools till the Sun stops shining. If,
> > on the other hand, you are distributing the binaries to
> > individuals who are NOT working for your company, then you
> > must release your modified source code  with the binaries or
> > give the source to anyone who asks for it AND you must
> > purchase a Qt license to continue using KDevelop for
> > commerical production.  IMHO, but IANAL.
> 
> Nonsense. <snip the rest of aa non-answer>
> 
> Bernd.

IYNSHO...  

Th First 5 conditions of the QPL are not listed, but
condition 6 of the QPL EXCLUDES selling  any developed
applications for more than the cost of distributrion and
prohibits distributing  applications WITHOUT the source
code.  That effectively prevents a company from selling
applications that contain trade secrets and propriatary
information embedded in code IF they want to keep secret
such propriatary information.
 
6. You may develop application programs, reusable components
and other software items that link with the original or
modified versions of the Software. These items, when
distributed, are subject to the following requirements: 

    a. You must ensure that all recipients of
machine-executable forms of these items are also able to
receive and use the complete machine-readable source code to
the items without any charge beyond the costs of data
transfer. 

    b. You must explicitly license all recipients of your
items to use and re-distribute original and modified
versions of the items in both machine-executable and source
code forms. The recipients must be able to do so without any
charges whatsoever, and they must be able to re-distribute
to anyone they choose. 

    c. If the items are not available to the general public,
and the initial developer of the Software requests a copy of
the items, then you must supply one. 

Jerry


Additional information sources:

http://www.qtarch.intranova.net/README

        We, Jeff Harris and Klaus Ebner, are the owner of
the source for
Qt Architect.  We intend for the source to remain freely
available to the Qt
community.  Qt Architect is distributed under the Gnu
General Public
License.  Qt Architect can be freely distributed, providing
that this file
be contained in the distribution

http://www.troll.no/qtfree.html

In order to support this effort, and to spread usage of Qt
around the world, we have released the Qt for Unix/X11
library free of charge for development of free software for
X11. We call this the Qt Free Edition. 

In doing this, we seek to bridge the gap between the free
software and commercial software worlds. We believe that
such bridging is absolutely necessary if free software is to
ever become a major player on desktops around the world.

The Qt Free Edition (version 2.0 and later) is released
under the Open Source license QPL. The Qt Free Edition may
be freely copied and distributed, put on ftp-sites and
CD-ROMs etc. Qt Free Edition is provided with no warranty
and no support.

http://www.troll.no/qpl/

Included below is version 1.0 of the license used for
version 2.0 of the Qt Free Edition. The license is called
the Q
Public License (or "QPL"), and qualifies as an Open Source
license. It is thus appropriate for people wishing to write
software under the Open Source model where all source code
to the software is made available to all users and can
be freely modified and redistributed. 

The QPL prohibits development of proprietary software. For
Qt our Qt Professional Edition product is available for
this.
You may use the QPL to license your own software. We feel it
is particularly well suited for anyone who wants to
run an Open Source project and still have the possibility to
earn some money to eat from sales to closed source
commercial developers.




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