[Development] Qt LTS & C++11 plans (CopperSpice)

[Marc Mutz]

On Tuesday 21 July 2015 22:26:17 Ansel Sermersheim wrote:
> As to your question about relicensing, can you please elaborate on what 
> this is referring to? As long as Qt is covered by the current license, 
> we can not relicense CopperSpice since we are bound by the terms of the 
> licenses under which we forked the code.

You own the copyright to those parts which you added. Come GPL4, you might 
conceivably want to use that license. Assuming TQC releases its code under 
GPL4, too, which it can, that leaves your own original work. Assuming it's 
just you and Barbara, you won't have problems. But if you have 200 
contributors, half of which vanished from the face of the earth after a few 
months of being active, you will have a harder time to track every contributor 
down and get approval for the relicensing from each of them. It's why many 
Free Software projects require some form of copyright assignment, incl. the 
Godfather of GPL projects, GNU.

You seem to say that Copperspice is in some sense more free than Qt, because 
of the missing CLA, but you may have locked yourself into a set of licenses 
forever, like the Linux kernel did (and it's anyone's guess whether Linus is 
*actually* happy with the GPL v2 and being stuck with it forever, or whether 
dropping the "or later" clause secretly gnaws at his conscience, after all he 
also publicly condemns C++ and then goes to write his diving app in Qt/C++ :)

IANAL, yadda, yadda,
Marc

-- 
Marc Mutz <marc.mutz at kdab.com> | Senior Software Engineer
KDAB (Deutschland) GmbH & Co.KG, a KDAB Group Company
Tel: +49-30-521325470
KDAB - The Qt Experts