2009/1/15 Kenneth Gonsalves lawgon@au-kbc.org:
During a recent discussion on the Qt license, you vehemently argued for GPL rather than LGPL licensing for Qt and quoted some no-gpl page from the scriptures. When Nokia announced LGPL for Qt, you were jumping for joy and endorsing it - quite possibly there is another page in the scriptures extolling the virtues of LGPL over GPL. Heads you win, tails I lose!
This is not a game of winning and losing. We are discussing and learning from each other. There are reasons why I believe GPL is better than LGPL. But Qt moving to LGPL was an important event especially to this list. Each license is designed for a particular case. If your goal is to have your software used by many people you go for a more permissive license like LGPL, BSD or even to public domain - which is no license (because there is no copyright to begin with). But if your goal is to make sure every one gets the same freedoms and want to give Free Software developers an advantage over proprietary developers then you go for more protective licenses like GPL. What my preference to Qt is irrelevant here because, I don't own Qt or I don't decide what license Qt should have. I really wanted them to clarify the use of the word 'commercial' and clearly adding LGPL has clarified it undoubtedly and even went farther allowing proprietary software to be created with Qt. There is no fight here (at least for me), we all learn.
- Praveen