Licensing issues with dbus and dbus-glib

[Thiago Macieira]

Christian F.K. Schaller wrote:
>Of course the 'truth' in the context of contract interpretation is
> defined by common perception and I guess a good litmus test to this
> understanding would be if KDE for instance came out and said that now
> that Qt is part of the LSB it is to be considered a system library and
> thus there is no need anymore to pay TrollTech to develop closed source
> Qt applications for Linux. If that ends up uncontested by TrollTech it
> would set a mighty precedent.

Sorry, but I do not think this example is valid.

The GPL allows you to link to GPL-incompatible components if they are 
considered part of the system. Even if we accept the hypothesis is Qt 
part of the system, closed source applications are hardly so. So, a 
GPL'ed Qt wouldn't be allowed to link to a closed-source application.

The example would be valid if Qt were licensed under GPL-incompatible 
licenses only (like the QPL or commercial licenses) and you wanted to 
link a GPL application to it.

Disclaimer: I used to work for Trolltech.

>Personally I prefer not to rely on system library clause for anything
> not specifically listed in the GPL which for the GPL3 means glibc and
> xlib as that is the only way currently to not get your lawyers into
> panick mode.

Same here. That was just a random thought.

Even if we considered libdbus-1 a system library on Linux, I think it 
would hardly be so in other systems, especially MacOS X and Windows. (The 
other Unixes might be more accommodating).

-- 
  Thiago Macieira  -  thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
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