[PyKDE] PyQwt win32 binary?

[Philippe Fremy]

	Hi all,

I had the chance to meet Eirik Eng (the president of Troll Tech) at the 
french Linux Expo. I didn't know that there where a whole thread on this 
list but I have asked him a few questions about PyQt and ohter things.

He is a very nice guy and was in charge of the licensing nightmare of Qt. 
Some of you probably remember that he was the author of one freshmeat 
editorial one month before they released Qt under GPL, where he tried to 
remember people that Qt was doing free software and that it didn't deserve 
all the bashing it was getting.

My question to him was something like "I consider it strange that you 
allowed one guy to distribute a working windows Qt for free, because it 
breaks your business model. Why did you let him do so ?". Well, his answer 
was that what Phil Thompson was doing was illegal and that they contacted 
him as soon as they realised it was there, to make an arrangment with 
TheKomany. 

I precise that my company owns a Qt windows license and that we were 
distributing a DLL of our own, statically linked to Qt. When we asked Troll 
Tech if this was legal, their answer was that it was ok if our library 
wasn't providing access to Qt or if it wasn't a wrapper around Qt. I don't 
have a copy of their commercial license but I guess they know what they are 
saying. And Phil was just distributing a wrapper around Qt, so it is 
illegal to distribute it, now you know it. 

It was really cool to have free PyQt for windows, but hey, it was illegal. 
According to this it looks like it is even illegal to recompile PyQt under 
windows with a Qt windows license and to distribute it.

What remains legal though is to port the GPL Qt to windows, compile PyQt 
with it and redistribute the whole thing.

Some unrelated informations I also got that might interest you if you are a 
Qt enthusiast :
-> Qt sells good. 20 % of the license are Unix only, 75 % are unix-windows, 
5 % are windows only. They have an income of 2 millions $ by month (I not 
sure if I remembered the correct number). They double the number of sales 
licences every 6 month.
-> Troll Tech has now 30 employee and is expanding (anybody interested ? 
You might need to move to Oslo).
-> they will probably release a beta of Qt 3.0 for march. It will feature a 
plugin system, a database backend, dynamic dialog generation from ui files, 
and probably a lot of other cool stuff. :-)
-> they are working on mac support but don't want to talk about it until it 
is ready. So please don't spread this. Unofficial release date goal is, 
well, I won't say it but it is before the end of the year, and probably 
even long before.
-> they were taking a big risk when they released Qt under GPL. Their 
greatest fear was that Red Hat could fork Qt and release their own version, 
that could concurrence Troll Tech itself. Now, they are not afraid of that 
anymore, nobody could really make Qt cooler than Troll Tech does, at the 
speed at which they are doing it.


It means that we might have a PyQt for unix, windows and mac. That would 
really rocks :-)))) Ok, except for the fact that cross platform PyQt is not 
free. :-(


About blackadder, I'm concerned about this problem: even if I buy a home 
user license, I won't be able to distribute my program, right ? So this 
license is almost useless to me and I can't afford a commercial license, 
especially to distribute free software.

Like many others, I think it would make sense to allow people to distribute 
free PyQt software, if not for free, at least for a small amount of money - 
hence for a home user license.

I think I will ask a few more questions to Eirik Eng about this. If you 
have specific questions, tell me and I will forward.

	regards,

	Philippe