Mark Shuttleworth on the future of Ubuntu

Mark Shuttleworth on the future of Ubuntu

Posted Jun 6, 2008 4:57 UTC (Fri) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281)
In reply to: Mark Shuttleworth on the future of Ubuntu by and
Parent article: Mark Shuttleworth on the future of Ubuntu

That's good to know about the AGPL, thanks for the information.

Should Nokia become less cooperative than Trolltech has historically been, this might be very problematic.

this is true for any project which requires copyright assignments: OpenOffice and MySql come to mind.

I don't think copyright assignments is the issue.

I'm not familiar with MySQL, but OpenOffice is LGPL, not GPL; furthermore, OpenOffice is an app, not a framework like Qt. For both of these reasons I see little or no cause for concern if Sun should change OpenOffice's license to some other FOSS license. That is, if I want to write a plugin for OpenOffice using the GPL4, I will have no problem.

A more relevant comparison is GTK, which is a framework like Qt. GTK being LGPL, I have no worries about writing GTK apps in my FOSS license of choice in the future.

But they can't revoke the licensing of the current version including the GPL exception which means that they can't prevent forks.

The problem is that no fork can add additional licenses, so if e.g. Nokia decides not to allow Qt apps to be written in GPL4, then no forking can help with that. We will be stuck in perpetuity with the last list of licenses Nokia has allowed us to use.

Also, there is still the QtFreeFoundation (or however it is was called again) which where is effectively controlled by the KDE community (KDE e.v ??) and has the right to release Qt under a BSD license if Trolltech "misbehaves".

This does not solve the problems I've mentioned. Nokia can continue to release Qt regularly while not allowing the GPL4, and Qt will not revert to a BSD license. "Misbehaves", as defined in that agreement, doesn't cover the problems that concern me.

(Also, it isn't Trolltech anymore, but Nokia ;) )

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> I'm not familiar with MySQL, but OpenOffice is LGPL, not GPL;       
furthermore, OpenOffice is an app, not a framework like Qt. For both of       
these reasons I see little or no cause for concern if Sun should change       
OpenOffice's license to some other FOSS license. That is, if I want to       
write a plugin for OpenOffice using the GPL4, I will have no problem.        
       
if you are really this much concerned about not being able to use       
not-yet-existing OSS licenses and about being able to write proprietary    
derivate works without a payment, you really should be using a BSD instead    
of the linux kernel: Even if there  was desire to switch to GPLv3, linux    
is still stuck to the GPL v2 until _every_ contributor agreed on    
relicensing or alternatively every single line of code from authors who    
haven't agreed is removed.     
     
on the other hand you will always be able to use/fork/remix all versions  
of Qt with (A)GPLv(2|3) code and link it to any code which uses one of the       
licenses mentioned in Qt's GPL exception. Also if you want to use your 
code with a newer license you can still dual-license it. 

Actually the Linux kernel is close enough to what I want: I can write userspace apps using any
license and run them on the Linux kernel. It's like the LGPL in that respect. That is, only if
I want to extend the kernel itself do I have license issues - which is the same situation with
GTK+, which is LGPL.

In other words, that the Linux kernel stays GPL2 doesn't matter to me, unless I want to extend
the kernel itself. Same as with GTK (which is also GPL2 last I checked, and again, it doesn't
matter unless I extend GTK itself).

This is the reason I prefer GTK and the Linux kernel's approach to licensing over Qt's (for
libraries/frameworks, at least. For normal apps, other licenses might be better).