[Qgis-developer] QIGS GPL -> LGPL - Tigers, Lions and Bears Oh My!

[G. Allegri]

I've read this thread with much interest, because it's a point that is
ofter discussed in some of the companies I work for and during the lessons
on Qgis.
I perfectly uderstand the rationale to mantain only a GPL license, because
LGPL would only give opportunities to third party developers without
bringing benefits back to the project. I respect this point of view from
the Qgis dev team.

Rather I was thinking about some king of dual licensing, like it is for Qt.
I know it's not a simple structure to manage, because Qgis would need a
commercial activity to mantain it (probably), but we could imagine that if
someone wants to close its own code he should pay to do it. This way we
give him an opportunity but, at least, with an economical benefit back to
Qgis which could finance its activities (bug fixing, infrastructure
mantainment, hackfests, etc.).
The difference between the Qt duel licensing and Qgis's, from my point of
view, should be that both the licenses offer exactly the same tools: in Qt,
if you pay, you can benefit of various extras. This shouldn't be for Qgis,
of course. The only diference is to give third party developers the
"freedom" to do not release their code, stop.

I know that from a conceptual point of view this still conflicts with the
idea to do not let others leaverage the community effort for their own
proprietary purposes, but I think it would be better then LGPL and could be
a way of  self-financing for the Qgis community ;)

giovanni


2011/11/17 Jürgen E. <jef at norbit.de>

> Hi Noli,
>
> On Thu, 17. Nov 2011 at 19:32:47 +1100, Noli Sicad wrote:
> > > GPL does not require to publish changes / plugins to everyone. E.g.
> say you
> > > create a plugin for a contractor, if you give them the binary and a
> source
> > > tarball, it's all fine with GPL, and there is no requirement for you
> or the
> > > contractor to publish the plugin to the public.
>
> > This is interesting take about GPL and QGIS plugins.
>
> > It means that the QGIS plugins is LGPL in this case.
>
> Why?  The plugin is also GPL.
>
>
> > If It is GPL, we the public can demand that QGIS plugin should be
> > available publicly both the source and binary.
>
> No.  Nobody is required to distribute at all.
>
> But if it's done, the source code has to be shipped too.  So unless the
> thing is
> public, only the client who got the plugin from the developer has a right
> to
> source.
>
> But there's nothing restricting the client to disclose it - but also
> nothing
> requiring him to do so.   If he does gives a binary to you, you can demand
> the
> source from him.
>
>
> Jürgen
>
> --
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> Dipl.-Inf. (FH)           Rheinstraße 13            Fax. +49-4931-918175-50
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