Gtk+ versus Qt
Posted Mar 29, 2007 23:19 UTC (Thu) by
Duncan (guest, #6647)
In reply to:
Gtk+ versus Qt by oak
Parent article:
The road to freedom in the embedded world
There is, however, rather more to this picture. Trolltech has very
deliberately "poison-pilled" any hostile buyout or takeover attempt.
(Unlike many smaller companies here in the US, it seems they value their
independence and are /not/ simply there to eventually be bought out.) The
currently active licensing arrangement for Qt is GPL/QPL/proprietary. In
practice, what this does is ensure people contribute back to the community
either with code, or if they don't want to do that, at least with money,
so they can take their work built on top proprietary, but in the process
fund the base that's dual licensed GPL as well, thus contributing to
further development of the free software side with money if they refuse to
contribute to it with code. =8^)
This of course has so far done a good job of keeping Trolltech financially
viable, as well as providing a technically great toolkit for use both in
freedomware and in proprietaryware. The "poison-pill" aspect of the
FreeQTFoundation, however, is that should it be triggered, the code would
*NOT* just be "freed" (there's no need for that, it's already free as in
freedom to anyone wishing to make their own code likewise), but would be
BSD-style licensed, thus allowing commercial use without "giving back" in
the form of code or cash, as is now required. Since the code is the same
but for the license, this would immediately devalue the company in terms
of cash-out value, thus discouraging any action that might trigger the
release in the first place.
BTW, it should also be noted that the way the foundation is setup (two
board members each from Trolltech and KDE, with the KDE side ruling in
case of a tie vote), should Trolltech ever cease to act in the interest of
KDE, KDE has the upper hand. Not that they're likely to trigger it in
anything like the foreseeable future, since that would kill the mutually
beneficial relationship that has and continues to benefit KDE greatly, but
it's nice to know that one way or another, KDE has the legal trump card
should it ever be needed.
Duncan
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