Thoughts about QT 5 from Nokia

I'm sorry, but not very much of this addresses the idea of accepting "LGPL as a[n] inbound license". With all parties required to adhere to those licensing conditions, Nokia (or Digia) could still charge people money for support, enhancements, and so on. My understanding was that the dual-licensing model offered customers the opportunity to keep the lid shut on all the code being shipped at the cost of not being able to modify the libraries licensed from Trolltech/Nokia. With Qt having been LGPL-licensed, the only apparent benefit in a proprietary licence, apart from the support offerings, is not having to provide the library source code if anyone asks, or having to provide the necessary interoperability with the freely-licensed library edition.

However, the discussion isn't really about whether a software project is sustainable without funding from proprietary licence sales. It's about whether people feel comfortable contributing to proprietary software. Many people don't really care about this - they're quite happy to release code under permissive licences, which frequently leads to the same end-result - but copyright assignment and the kind of relicensing agreement seen here introduce a two tier system in software projects.

Some people might regard a compromise in their own licensing as a reasonable price to pay for the momentum, vitality, stability or quality of the project they are contributing to, but recent experience has shown that unequal treatment of contributors tends to put undue stress on communities: the Oracle acquisition of Sun (and the history of open source projects in Sun) can provide a few examples. If the community aspect of a project is important with volunteers bearing the load and making important decisions, then reserving privileges for one party is going to undermine such aspirations. This is especially the case if there is ever disagreement about a project's direction.

I'm sure that someone will point out (yet again) that copyright assignment isn't the same as a relicensing agreement, whether up-front or as a future option, and certainly if you merely accept other licences being applied to your code than the ones you would have chosen yourself without any persuasion or coercion, you at least get to contribute the same code to other projects. That said, I grow increasingly concerned that some companies will start to use patents to prevent code in "their" projects appearing elsewhere. That's another reason why contributor agreements seem to be more popular than accepting contributions as they are already licensed: corporations don't like having their hands tied by contributors when a bit of patent aggression could be practised against others, even those who may be legitimately using the same code.

"First: You got an implicit suggestion to impose US copyright law in Europe?"

I implied no such thing. There is nothing US specific about Free software licenses, especially the latest version of GPL and LGPL have been carefully written to be applicable globally and there are tens of thousands of free software projects from Europe which doesn't require any grants. If you want to show that they are somehow wrong, the burden of proof is on you.

My discussions have nothing whatsoever to do with Fedora and I view this as a misdirection at best but to address your point, Fedora is a distribution and all distributions primarily do integration work but if you talking about Red Hat, they do go far beyond that and yes, that includes desktop components as well.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions#Free_...

GNOME Shell, NetworkManager, D-Bus, large amounts of GTK development and the list goes on. Feel free to look up how many of those upstream projects, even ones started by Red Hat and primary funded by even now requires any similar legal agreements.