[Interest] aboutQt (Qt 4.8) dialog lacks vital information -> people relying on it violate license terms(?)

[Jonas Thiem]

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Hi guys,

I asked for a summary text of all licensing information which needs to
embedded into an application for legal reasons before, and I got the
IMHO not really satisfying answer to simply use the aboutQt dialog.
(what if I want my own with some info about my own app added? why is it
so hard to put the required text in some complete, easy to copy form on
the homepage of Qt as well?)

Anyway, I followed the pointer and looked at the aboutQt dialog of Qt
4.8. I compared it with Qt 4.8 licensing as described on
http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/licensing.html to see if its contents
hold up to it.

Please note IANAL. But it seems the dialog is incomplete in various
regards, which puts everyone who relies on simply showing that dialog on
a legal risk. Therefore I suggest the following issues to be corrected
as soon as possible, given a lawyer agrees after a review that those are
indeed a problem as I'm just guessing here:

1.) No full LGPL license text:

The LGPL 2.1 as per section 5, 6 appears to require that an application
includes copyright information on any LGPL libs it depends on (no matter
if statically or just dynamically linked), *and include the full LGPL
license text*.

Quote:

"You must give prominent notice with each copy of the work that the
Library is used in it and that the Library and its use are covered by
this License. You must supply a copy of this License. If the work during
execution displays copyright notices, you must include the copyright
notice for the Library among them, as well as a reference directing the
user to the copy of this License."

The about dialog contains Qt 4.8 copyright information, but not the LGPL
license text. This means every application linked to Qt would need to
include it and add a note to the about dialog on where the file is
exactly, so the user can read it.

The website link is void, because the LGPL requires that you supply a
copy of the license along with your application.

2.) PySide 1.2.1 is not in aboutQt at all

This is PySide-specific, but PySide is also LGPL, but it doesn't bother
to add itself to the about dialog. So any application just relying on
the about dialog will also violate the PySide LGPL.

3.) Apple contributions to Qt 4.8 are not covered in the about dialog.

The licensing of those contributions includes:

"Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution."

Since Qt itself is just a lib and cannot pop up such a dialog randomly,
the application needs to take care of this. And again, the standard
provided aboutQt dialog doesn't fulfill those conditions, so
applications appear to be again at a loss if not fulfilling this.

4.) qt3to4 contributions are not covered in the about dialog. (I'm
assuming they are part of Qt 4.8? The licensing page doesn't really
specify this)

The licensing of those contributions includes:

"The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included
in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

I'm guessing legally, "copies or substantial portions of the Software"
includes binary distributions. In that case, again Qt cannot display
this on its own without relying on the application, so I guess the
application would need to fulfil this and again, this would really need
to be in the aboutQt dialog?

5.) No mention of Easing Equations by Robert Penner.

Again it isn't quite obvious if those are included in standard Qt 4.8,
but in case they are:

The licensing of Easing Equations includes:

"Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution."

Again, the standard Qt about dialog lacks both the copyright and license
text as asked for by the licensing.

6.) Catharon Code is missing from the about dialog.

The licensing specifies:

"If you use it, or  only parts of it,  in a program,  you must
acknowledge somewhere  in  your  documentation  that  you  have  used
the Catharon Code. (`credits')"

Again, the Qt dialog doesn't mention it. I suppose Qt includes FreeType
and with that, Catharon Software as well?




Please don't take this purely as an annoying nitpick. I would really ask
you to keep in mind that those issues possibly affect EVERY Qt program
where the author relies in good faith on the accuracy of the aboutQt
dialog to safe him from legal trouble and to fulfill all copyright &
licensing display issues. And I guess that's about every Qt program out
there.

Therefore, please consider passing this on to some legal person from
Digia or to someone else who can actually do something about this!
(again I am not a lawyer, I cannot suggest what would be a correct
solution, just point out what APPEARS to be faulty)

It would be really awesome if for the sake of everyone using Qt without
a huge legal department behind them, the aboutQt dialog could be fixed.

Also again a huge sorry for bothering if all those issues are wrong and
the dialog is sufficient. Again, I'm not really qualified to say if the
dialog is legally wrong or not.

Regards,
Jonas Thiem

PS: I only examined the Qt 5.x dialog very shortly, but it has a similar
obvious possible issue: it doesn't contain the full LGPL text either,
and also it doesn't refer to a file on disk shipped along with the
application that contains it.
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