[Qgis-developer] QGIS License (was Qt 4.X)

[Radim Blazek]

On 9/7/06, Gary Sherman <sherman at mrcc.com> wrote:
> > I support licensing QGIS under the LGPL. Hopefully it's not too late
> > to make a change.
>
> Its not too late as long as we can get all the code contributors to agree.
> Are we sure that LGPL covers everything or should we consider another
> license as long as we are talking about change?

I believe that it is important to allow distribution of proprietary
extensions (plugins)
for any desktop GIS. I am not sure if realy everything should be LGPL/MIT,
probably not. The best IMO whould be to allow only proprietary plugins and
data providers. That way we can be sure we get all the improvement for
the base application back in free version.

But, I don't believe it is possible! Qt free edition is GPL and if you use
the free edition of Qt you must release your application as GPL. You cannot use
a library developped with Qt free edition in a proprietary application
built with Qt commercial edition!
It is the Qt licence for commercial version which does not allow to use
QGIS libs in proprietary applications, not the license of QGIS.

Radim