From: Paul Lutus <nospam@...>
Date: 2006-09-28T01:25:11+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby with Qt or GTK ?

Vincent Fourmond wrote:

> Jason Roelofs wrote:
>> No, Gregarican is right, Qt is not free for commercial applications but
>> free (GPL'd) for non-commercial / OSS applications.
> 
>   Well, let's put it this way: Qt is dual licensed, one is commercial,
> one is GPL. So it *is* free/open source software. But I agree that you
> can't really build commercial applications with a GPL license. I was
> merely pointing out what seemed a terminology mistake.

I read this earlier and wondered about it. Can a company really release
software under the GPL, but place restrictions on its use like "no
commercial applications"? Do they have that right? I thought the entire
point of GPL was to make the source available to anyone, for any purpose,
and the recipients would have the same rights and obligations as the
originator (like publishing their own source).

And I could certainly be wrong. I pay much more attention to programming
issues than legal ones.

Also, AFAICS it isn't true that you can't create commercial applications
using GPL code. You just have to trust that people won't steal your work.
Sometimes this is a legitimate placing of trust, sometimes not.

-- 
Paul Lutus
http://www.arachnoid.com