[Interest] Contributor agreement rundown

[Lincoln Ramsay]

On 04/18/2012 05:28 PM, ext André Somers wrote:
> Op 18-4-2012 8:23, Donald Carr schreef:
>> Any customer who buys their way out of the LGPL requirements of up
>> streaming changes to Qt places a maintenance burden on themselves that
>> they are fully entitled to and may well end up ruing. It is their
>> baby, and the money they pay for said baby is one more copper coin
>> keeping the organ monkey grinding. The "secret sauce" (diff) hording
>> route contains enough pitfalls without the evangelical chorus stemming
>> from RMS' pantaloons.
>>
> That sounds quite poetic, but is a bit hard to parse for a non-native
> speaker. I *think* I get the gist of it, but I'm not sure. Could you
> rephrase in a way that uses less colorfull language, please?

If you buy a commercial Qt, you don't get the [L]GPL license on the code 
so you are free to keep your patches secret.

However, if you are maintaining a set of patches on top of Qt, you'll 
need to rebase them often or you'll fall behind the public version.

We get paid money when you buy a commercial license. That money goes to 
improving Qt.

Experience shows that it is easier and cheaper to upstream patches than 
it is to rebase them all the time. Thus it is likely that many changes 
will be upstreamed even in the absence of the [L]GPL license. Plus we're 
getting money to fund Qt development.

-- 
Lincoln Ramsay - Senior Software Engineer
Qt Development Frameworks, Nokia - http://qt.nokia.com/