pleasantly surprised

Posted Apr 26, 2006 10:14 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: pleasantly surprised by sbishop
Parent article: KDE's core library - Qt - included in new LSB desktop standard

As somebody who took part in the debate over this ...

Various people wanted to get GTK in. The Qt people went rather mad over this, and forcibly pointed out that Qt is "more Free" than GTK because it's GPL. In the middle of this stand-off, somebody pointed out that even the LGPL didn't actually meet the requirements as stated. About the only acceptable licences were BSD, artistic and similar.

So the result was a major row on the mailing list (I blotted my copybook, about the only actual flame was mine :-(

Anyways. They must have changed the criteria. I suspect it was done in the teleconference, which I don't attend, so I don't know exactly what happened. I did, however, suggest that the criteria should be "if the licencing regime supports the Four Freedoms for ALL users, then the licencing is okay". If you think about it, "GPL + proprietary" DOES meet that requirement, given a suitable proprietary licence, and I think Qt falls well within that. Note that the "commercially friendly" criteria has almost certainly not been dropped (after all, that is the whole point of the LSB), so "GPL only" probably doesn't cut it.

That "all users" bit is important :-) somebody with a commercial licence still needs to be protected.

I need to hunt up the criteria web page. I didn't bookmark it, and last time I searched I couldn't find it.

Cheers,
Wol

pleasantly surprised

Posted Apr 26, 2006 18:29 UTC (Wed) by olafjanschmidt (guest, #37373) [Link] (1 responses)

In the middle of this stand-off, somebody pointed out that even the LGPL didn't actually meet the requirements as stated.

Yes, that was me. :-)

They must have changed the criteria. I suspect it was done in the teleconference, which I don't attend, so I don't know exactly what happened.

When we were unable to find a clear consensus within the LSB workgroup, the FSG decided to simply remove the license criterion. The reasons were:

ISVs need to check the licenses of the libraries they link to in any case, so there is no need to protect them from accidental linking.
If ISVs don't like the license of a library, then they can always statically link an alternative.
Some lawyers claim that linking does not create a derivative work, and if you believe them, then the license does not matter anyway.
Problematic licenses would not make it into all relevant distributions, which stays a requirement.

Olaf

pleasantly surprised

Posted Apr 27, 2006 11:43 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

"Some lawyers claim that linking does not create a derivative work, and if you believe them, then the license does not matter anyway."

That "some lawyers" being Larry Rosen in particular, who was the target of the aforementioned flame.

I would suggest going to his web-site, reading his book (Chapter 6 especially, iirc), and then carefully comparing his analysis with the actual wording of the GPL. The result should be revealing :-)

Cheers,
Wol