[Gambas-user] Some info for a news writer

[Rob]

On Sunday 01 February 2004 06:16, Fabien Bodard wrote:
> > QT has the double licence, if you pay Trolltech, it should
> > be possible, but what about Gambas in that case?
> Gambas is GNU Ware... so you can use it freely in all of case.
> The sole limit is that you must paid the trolltech licence to
> sell graphical gambas ware

Not quite correct.  The trolltech license is written such that 
you can either license Qt as GPL, QPL (not an issue here) or 
commercially.  However, if you started coding a program against 
Qt/Free, and that includes using the Gambas Qt component as it 
exists now to write Gambas code, it can never be released as 
non-free software.  See their FAQs:

http://www.trolltech.com/developer/faqs/general.html

"The Free Edition license applies to the development phase - 
anything developed without Professional or Enterprise Edition 
licenses must be released as free/open source software."  They 
do this to prevent companies from buying one license of Qt/Pro 
and having 10 other programmers use Qt/Free to develop their 
commercial software without releasing it as GPL.

Therefore, the Gambas Qt component must always be GPL, and 
normally can't be linked against something with a proprietary 
license such as Qt/Pro/Enterprise.  However, if Benoit (and 
Nigel, for the qt.ext component) were to add a special exception 
to the Gambas Qt component's copy of the GPL to allow linking 
against the Qt/Pro and Qt/Enterprise versions, as the Linux 
kernel developers have done to allow binary device drivers, that 
might be enough to allow people to run Gambas Qt applications 
against non-free versions of Qt legally.  

You can't link GPL software against the Pro or Enterprise 
versions of Qt without that special permission, which is why 
(for example) there's still no native PerlQt for Windows.  Now, 
in PerlQt's case pretty much everyone including the PerlQt 
developers wants there to be a Windows PerlQt, up to the point 
of encouraging people to make their own private ports and post 
instructions on how to do it, so what I described above might 
not be sufficient in the eyes of Trolltech.

I'm no lawyer, but that's what I get from reading the FAQ's at 
gnu.org and trolltech.com.  Of course, the ideal way around this 
(for someone who really cared about being able to release 
non-free software) would be to just write a wxwindows or gtk 
component as Daniel suggested, and then make the necessary mods 
to the IDE to get it to run under both components 
interchangably.  (Not to mention rewriting the GambasEditor 
component....)  

I personally dread that day because that'll be when we start 
seeing dozens of trivial closed-source Gambas apps with 
increasingly bad behavior flood the market as Windows shareware 
authors see a way into Linux (at least with Qt/Pro it requires a 
real investment before you can release non-Free software), but I 
understand why people want it and why it would help Gambas 
adoption.

Rob