> I happen to like those "scum sucking, bottom-feeding lawyers" better
> than people who take The GIMP source code, change from GTK to QT,
> against the wishes of The GIMP's authors.
I happen to agree with your sentiments. The fact that this was done
_AGAINST_ the GIMP's authors' wishes speaks for itself. It's a waste of
time and energy doing things like this, and I have to wonder why they
did this. Actually, from reading the GIMP's GPL notice, I have the
distinct impression that this is actually illegal, using propretiary
(even if it's free for non-commercial) source code with GIMP because
that implies that the GPL notice is void, or overriden by the copyrights
in QT.
Whatever, the end result is that this little flamefest will have a
negative impact on uninformed others - and they may decide not to use QT
based software, which of course, will make us *and* TrollTech suffer,
which is something I don't want to see - it might make the big boys
(IBM, Microsoft etc) dismiss us as just mosquitoes fit to be squashed.
I'd also like to see some comments from RMS (of GNU fame) on this.
Personally, I'm also worried that we're just playing into Microsoft's
hands because of all this crap going on. They might even say to their
corporate bootlickers.. "Oh they're infighting all the time and have no
coherent strategy overall", thus implying that we are of no consequences
and not worth bothering with. THIS WILL HURT US IN THE END. FULL STOP.
The ways out of this mess is 1) for the KDE people to drop the QT
toolkit and either move to QTK, or roll their own, or 2) for TrollTech
to modify the terms of their licencing for QT - i.e any GPL'd software
"linked" against QT is not subject to the same terms + conditions of
QT's licence and must be distributed under the GPL.
Comments?
Cheers,
Alex.
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