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

Jonas Thiem jonasthiem at googlemail.com
Sun Apr 6 04:18:34 CEST 2014


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

True about the source code distribution, but maybe the dialog could at
least attempt to cover all written stuff that needs to be in a program
according to all the licenses in Qt? That would already save a lot of
work.

And yes, people shouldn't rely on it. However, I suppose many will
naively assume that the copyright mumble jumble in there is sufficient
in regards of the required copyright mumble jumble to fulfill that
part of the licenses, but apparently it just isn't. (which shouldn't
be too hard to fix)

You can kind of see it from the previous mailing list reaction:

I asked for a neat summary for what I need to put in my program to
fulfill the copyright quotations a few days ago since
http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/licensing.html isn't exactly easily
to embed, and I was pointed to the about dialog.


If in addition the documentation was improved too, I don't mind of course.

Regards,
Jonas Thiem

On 04/06/2014 04:00 AM, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> Em dom 06 abr 2014, às 00:25:17, Jonas Thiem escreveu:
>> 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.
> 
> No one should simply assume a dialog fulfils the legal needs. It
> doesn't and it will never do it.
> 
> Most of the above requires changes to the documentation. Not to the
> about dialog.
> 
> What's more, there are a few requirements that cannot be met by a
> dialog. For example, everyone needs to distribute Qt themselves, on
> a server they own or are responsible for, not rely Qt Project or
> Digia to have the sources.
> 
> Can the dialog be improved? Yes. But "author relies in good faith
> on the accuracy of the aboutQt dialog to save him from legal
> trouble" is just never going to happen. The dialog will never be
> enough.
> 
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1
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=6NQy
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----



More information about the Interest mailing list