[Qt-interest] LGPL compliance poll

[Kustaa Nyholm]

> That's the relevant part: licensee. So you must seek in the copyright law
> which circumstances trigger the need of a license.

Good luck with that (reading the copyright law)!

Wikipedia, the absolute truth ;-) , says:

"Copyright is <snip> the right to control copying" <snip>"

with no mention of if it is for public distribution or not."

The US copyright law says (slightly edited for clarity):

§106  the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do
and to authorize *any* of the following:

(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies
(3) to distribute copies to the public

Note the 'any' word, ie the copyright holder can prohibit copying with no
mention of distribution.

On the other hand in the Finnish copyright law it has been clearly (?)
spelled out that copyright grants the right to control the work of art by
copying and distribution to the public.

> The right hand moving stuff to the left hand doesn't count as licensing.

If you are referring to distributing within a company this is not clear cut
in my view.

Not only is it unclear in GPL when a license is needed but also who or what
a licensee is, but also, considering that a lot of GPL'ed ode is contributed
into that project under some assumption of what each individual contributor
thinks GPL means, it is totally unclear what interpretation holds for each
contributed part.

br Kusti