>>Free software is worth encouraging. Status quo closed source is not.<br>So, this is a problem, but it is ok to use free software to help the growth of a company that profits in selling licenses for closed source software?
<br><br>>>Trolltech GPL's most of the code it develops, which guarantees that<br>>>software will remain free ad infinitum. So ya, equating the copyright<br>>>assignment for both FSF and Trolltech is the same.
<br>Yes, GPL guarantees that, but a library in GPL is not that useful for a developer that sometimes have to do closed source apps. And please don't start with the "I will not help anyone developing closed source" discourse, since a number of free projects contributors have to do this, support themselves with the money earned so they can continue contributing. Indeed to have a full time open source programming job is a dream for most people I know.
<br>Even FSF releases its libraries in LGPL, well, they created it. For this there will be no practical possibility of community fork for Qt or Qtopia, and weakening the force of the community in the decisions. I really believe that you at Trolltech are not willing to abuse your position, but what if Qtopia is the ubiquitous software platform to develop upon, so that there is no thinkable alternative? What if all you good guys, that I could trust, get out of Trolltech, and managers that could not get a job at Microsoft replace you, and change the way you work with the developers? Can you guarantee that this will never happen?
<br>I doubt.<br>And a copyright assignment with FSF, a non-profit organization, and with Trolltech, a regular company, is not the same. We cannot let the licenses think for ourselves.<br><br>Surely that a lot of (obviously for profit) companies back the GTK+, Hildon and other LGPL/other-permissive-license libraries and tools, but the sinergy of sometimes conflicting interests is a good thing, and helps to avoid the possibility of an unilateral control that benefits one part more than the others.
<br><br>Lorn, I don't want to offend you and the company you work and surely love, and the products that are technically great, I just don't think that this model is strategically good for all projects.<br><br>Regards,
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