Author: Richard Stallman
Email: rms@gnu.org
Date: 1998/11/21
The latest news about Qt is that Troll Tech has proposed to
rerelease it under a new license, the QPL. This license would make
Qt free software; there would no longer be a principled reason to
reject using it, and thus no principled reason to reject using KDE.
Indeed, if Qt is Troll Tech’s only product (which might be so; I
don’t know), then by a strange reversal, this would actually make
them a free software company.
However, the QPL has major practical drawbacks: source
modifications can be released only in the form of patches, and it
is incompatible with the GNU GPL. This means that linking existing
GPL-covered software with Qt would require giving special
permission.
With Qt being free software, there would be no fundamental
reason to refuse this special permission, but it remains better if
we can avoid it. As a practical matter, it will be preferable to
use Harmony, both to avoid the need to make special exceptions, and
to avoid the practical inconvenience of the requirement to
distribute modifications patches.