osOpinion: Who Redhat Should Really Buy

[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]

“However, there is still a problem. The QPL. Yes, yes, I
know that it has been blessed by all the appropriate open source
luminaries. I know that even RMS has admitted that it is “Open
Source”. But it is still a screwball license. It still doesn’t make
it really easy for adaptive development of the QT library. And
it acts as a complete damper to porting KDE software to other
platforms (for example, BeOS). You may say that you don’t care
about other platforms. But someday we will come up with a next
generation of X, and the QPL will stand staunchly athwart the
porting of KDE and its applications to that environment.”

“In other words, we still have a problem. And since the Harmony
project seems to have fallen by the wayside, there is no end in
site.”

“Well, I have a suggestion: Redhat should buy Troll Tech and
place QT under the LGPL or BSD licenses. Let’s face it: they have
the money. I doubt that Troll Tech would be TOO antagonistic since
they are obviously interested in Free Software (they are giving
away their life’s blood to support Free Software). And Heaven knows
that Redhat has the money. This is strikingly similar to what they
did in buying Cygnus: it secures the future of a critical component
to the Linux system. And is a far better place to put their money
than buying Corel.”

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