[Interest] Website suggestion: provide proper one-page text only license legalese compilation for Qt 4.8 and Qt 5

Jonas Thiem jonasthiem at googlemail.com
Mon Apr 28 03:42:52 CEST 2014


Hi mailing list,

I suggested this before, but there wasn't much feedback on it. (except
for a vague "maybe not an entirely bad idea") I'll write this down as
a dedicated mail so it doesn't get lost.

PROBLEM:

The licensing information for Qt 4.8 (still in use through PySide) and
Qt 5.x regarding all the copyright and license stuff that NEED to be
in an application's about dialog to fulfill legal needs (so that's
important to know) is hard to collect.

License texts and info that is probably legally required to be
required in every Qt application (or not - I'm not a lawyer) is spread
across those pages and probably even more:
http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/licenses.html
http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/3rdparty.html
http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/lgpl.html
http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/pdf-licensing.html
...

They are all linked from
http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/licensing.html (hopefuly??) but still
you'd need to visit every single sub page, and copy all the stuff
there.

To make matters even worse, it's all HTML with the whole Qt page
layout around, so not in any format that would it make easy to copy
for an about dialog.

As an additional issue, http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/3rdparty.html
kind of suggests it is the only list required to be shown apart from
the Qt LGPL (since everyone knows Qt is LGPL and those are apparently
all third-parties it uses, right?). However, that is NOT the case I
think, so in addition it's NOT obvious to the average dev which page
contains really everything that should be included.

(Suggested) SOLUTION:

1.) Provide one single text file (or simple HTML without any styling
or navigation around it) with ALL of the license stuff of EVERYTHING
used in Qt, including the LGPL and GPL itself in full length.
2.) Link it from an easy to find place on the website (e.g. from
http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/licensing.html right before the table
containing the HTML versions for regular online reading) with the hint
that it contains all the stuff linked below for regular reading in one
single culminated file.

There is no need to claim it would cover everything required for legal
reasons, no need for a legal guarantee of suitability or anything, no
need for an advise that it is all an about dialog needs to show.
(since it was previously stressed this needs to happen in a way that
in no way suggests to be a legal advise e.g. to how an about dialog
needs to look like for legal reasons)

Instead, I suggest you name it "downloadable text-only culmination of
all license info in single document (of the online reading versions
linked in table below)" or similar - people who are looking for this
will then most likely know this is what they want.



So far, only big companies like EA (their Origin DRM beast uses Qt)
seem to actually go through the trouble to collect all the info as
required - not really surprising I'd say given the current confusing
Qt website info on it. Please help making the average dev's live
easier by considering this suggestion for the Qt website. Thanks!

Regards,
Jonas Thiem

PS: Are people who could possibly implement this change on the website
on this mailing list? Or would I be better off somehow forwarding this
to the Digia website team or something?



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