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[News.eclipse.foundation] Re: SWT for KDE / Qt?
If there is a question, then no corporate lawyer would allow such a release. So, yes, even if a Qt port existed, I'm pretty sure none of the SWT committers would be allowed by their employer to work on it because of the legal implications.

This is something that has always bothered me about KDE and Qt. Yes, it looks great and I understand that Trolltech needs revenue to pay for it's development. But don't be fooled into thinking it's open source. GPL is there to protect their investment, but it also prevents widespread commercial adoption.

I keep hoping that Nokia, who recently bought Trolltech, will change their business model. But that is just my hope. In the meantime, GTK with it's more commercial friendly LGPL license slowly gets better.

Doug.

Jörg von Frantzius wrote: 
Hello Mike,

I'm asking just because I'd like to use it, as probably most KDE users will want to. So, no development team waiting to start work on it here, unfortunately, but not a rhetorical question either.

I'm pretty sure that the GPL exception does not extend to commercial products, as long as they aren't licensed under one of the mentioned OSS licenses themselves. The point is that this doesn't seem to preclude the Eclipse Foundation from releasing an SWT port for Qt, whoever could be creating it. It would then just exist for developer's pleasure, if you want. There were rumours floating around that there even already /exists/ a Qt port, but that it simply couldn't be released due to legal issues, i.e. before the GPL exceptions were made by Trolltech. Steve Northover sounded a bit like the legal issues were the only problem with creating a Qt port.

Maybe it's just wishful thinking that Steve et al would do it, or even already had done it. But still I'd like to make sure that there simply is no legal issue standing in the way.

Regards,
Jörg

Mike Milinkovich schrieb:
Jörg,
The short answer is we don't know. I just looked at the license exception and it seems to at least be helpful. But the hard part in doing these analyses is always figuring out the commercial distribution case. Eclipse is specifically set up to not only allow but encourage commercial adoption of technologies that are delivered by Eclipse projects. I am not sure that their exception goes far enough to allow that. Doing such an analysis would require a fairly significant investment in time and money.
Is this a rhetorical question, or do you have a development team interested in working on this?

    "Jörg von Frantzius" <joerg.von.frantzius@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
    <mailto:joerg.von.frantzius@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote in message
    news:ftvfga$dj$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
    Hi,

    in https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=20486 it was
    stated that a Qt/KDE port of SWT cannot be released due to
    licensing issues with GPL. For some time now, Trolltech defines
    GPL exceptions (http://trolltech.com/products/qt/gplexception)
    which seem to allow such a thing, since the Eclipse Public License
    is explicitly listed there.

    Could someone in the know clarify what the Eclipse Foundation's
    official stance is here?

    Thanks for any comments,
    Jörg