From: Gregory Seidman <gsslist+ruby@...>
Date: 2008-03-04T01:11:50+09:00
Subject: Re: qtruby4 license

On Tue, Mar 04, 2008 at 12:51:06AM +0900, Christian Kerth wrote:
> Gregory Seidman wrote:
> > It seems like LGPL would be ideal in this instance. I believe that's
> > what KDE uses, for exactly the same reasons. Why wouldn't it be
> > possible for QtRuby?
> 
> And with LGPL it would be possible to have a commerical license for the 
> whole program und just "use" the bindings as library?

Almost correct. The LGPL is compatible with the GPL, so a fully GPL'd
program can use it and, through it, a GPL-licensed Qt library. The LGPL
only applies to the specific code (usually a library) licensed with it,
however, so a commercial product could use a commercially licensed Qt
library through the LGPL'd QtRuby library and distribution of the
application would only involve an obligation to provide the QtRuby source
(under the LGPL), not the Qt source nor the source of the program nor any
license to that source.

IANAL, but this sort of compromise has come up in the past, for exactly
these reasons, and KDE is the prime (and most relevant) example.

--Greg
P.S. please don't top post.