Re: [DotGNU]Qt Theming being a GPL violation

[Rhys Weatherley]

On Monday 21 June 2004 02:11 am, Rich Baumann wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-06-19 at 17:50, Rhys Weatherley wrote:
> > The moral of the story is this: we need to add some information to the
> > documentation that the Qt themer can only be used with applications whose
> > licenses are compatible with the GPL.  If a user uses the Qt themer to
> > run a non-compatible application, then the user has caused a violation to
> > occur.
>
> Users can't violate the GPL, only distributors can.

You're forgetting the proprietry license on the *application*.  If the Qt 
themer promotes all of pnetlib to GPL, then distributing the application to a 
user's system and running it will cause a violation if source is not 
available for the application.

> An example of this is proprietary
> Nvidia drivers being used by an X server upon which Qt-based
> applications are running; the end user makes the connections between the
> GPL and non-GPL components, so there is no license violation.

Nvidia implicitly assumes that their drivers will be used "for X in the usual 
manner", which includes a lot of free and proprietry use cases.  Nvidia is 
well aware of this.  It would be impossible to make the case that Trolltech 
has made Qt available "for SWF in the usual manner", either implicitly or 
explicitly.

Cheers,

Rhys.