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

Thiago Macieira thiago.macieira at intel.com
Wed Jul 22 01:16:26 CEST 2015


On Wednesday 22 July 2015 00:15:19 Marc Mutz wrote:
> 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.

To be fair, those projects often limit the set of licences that the code can 
be relicensed under. For example, KDE requires all inbound contributions to be 
either:

	GPLv2, GPLv3 or later
	GPLv2, GPLv3 or any later version by a decision of the KDE e.V.

That is, even if the e.V. wanted to, it could not relicense under, say, the 
Apache licence version 2. It has to be an upgrade of the GPL.

The KDE Free Qt Foundation requires relicensing under the terms of the BSD 
licence. No other.

Other projects may limit to licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative. 
Some others may say OSI approved *and* copyleft.

In the specific case of the Qt Project CLA, it makes no judgement. It can be 
any license, including non-open source ones. Which is the case.


And since I'm being fair: the CLA is required by the KDE Free Qt Foundation, 
since The Qt Company has to have the rights to relicense everything under the 
BSD license. The only other option would be to have all inbound contributions 
under the BSD licence.
-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center




More information about the Development mailing list