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

[Ansel Sermersheim]

On 7/21/15 3:15 PM, Marc Mutz wrote:
> 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.

As we mentioned, we have several people testing CopperSpice as well as 
others asking about how to contribute to the project. We certainly look 
forward to having an active development community.

We do in fact have a CLA in place. However, our CLA has one single 
purpose. In the event that Qt is re-licensed under a BSD style license 
(whether due to the KDE Free Qt Foundation or some other reason), we 
will re-license CopperSpice under that same license. That is the only 
permission we ask from contributors.

> 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++ :)
Just to be clear, we are not opposed to a CLA and as noted above we have 
one as well. We simply did not feel comfortable contributing under the 
Qt Company CLA for reasons which we have previously stated.

We do understand and appreciate the logic and the financial reasons that 
led to the Qt Company CLA.

Ansel Sermersheim