[techtalk] KDE license?

[Noah L. Meyerhans]

On Fri, 11 Feb 2000, Sunnanvind wrote:

> Rik; you mentioned that you knew the KDE license.
> Could you or anyone else please explain why the KDE license is not bad?
> Including QT etc.

This is my understanding of it...I believe it's correct, but Rik may know
more...

KDE itself is licensed under the GPL.  This potentially caused problems
regarding KDE 1.x, which was linked against the closed source Qt 1.x.  The
GPL states that GPL code can only link against closed-source libraries
*if* those closed source libraries are distributed as a standard part of
"the system".  That's why we never saw this problem when linking GPL code
with Motif on commercial Unixes: they all came with Motif by default.

So, Troll (makers of Qt) were pursuaded to license Qt under an open source
license.  Their license is roughly comparable to the Mozilla license, and
has been certified as open source by groups like OSI and SPI.  However,
the QPL is not 100% compatible with the GPL, so a small exception has to
be made in the GPL so it can be linked with QPL code.  The problem here is
that not all KDE code is original, so the original authors must be
contacted and must give permission to re-license their code under the
slightly modified GPL...

Or something like that, I think...
noah

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