[Development] redistributing QPA and platform style plugins

[Thiago Macieira]

On segunda-feira, 3 de abril de 2017 03:09:16 PDT René J.V. Bertin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> As you know I've been tinkering with the Cocoa QPA plugin and the Macintosh
> style.
> 
> Are there legal restrictions to making my modified versions available (say
> on github) other than maintaining the license headers and any licensing
> files?

It's open-source. You're encouraged to make your changes available to others. 
You're also encouraged to contribute the important changes back to Qt.

> How feasible is to extract these components and make it possible to build
> them standalone (preferably using CMake)? A cursory look suggests that the
> Cocoa platform plugin might be easier isolate than the built-in Macintosh
> style, correct?

That's your problem. We don't have to make it easy for you to fork Qt code. 
Specifically, there's no binary compatibility guarantee between the QPA plugin 
and QtGui. Keeping a fork of a QPA plugin is not recommended.

Now, if you want to make a better style than what Qt provides, just look at 
how Breeze does it in KDE.

> And last but not least, does doing this have any incidence on "upstreaming",
> should I ever decide to submit some of those modifications?

The recommendation is that you think of upstreaming early. The longer it takes 
you to upstream, the more stale your changes may be and the more difficult it 
may become to merge them.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center