[PyQt] Using PyQT under the MIT license?

Phil Thompson phil at riverbankcomputing.com
Thu Feb 12 09:25:02 GMT 2009


On Wed, 11 Feb 2009 22:13:41 -0800, Jim Tilander <jim at tilander.org> wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> So after a little bit of digging I saw that Qt itself allows for some
> other open source licenses
> (http://doc.trolltech.com/4.4/license-gpl-exceptions.html) including
> MIT License, which is my favourite no nonsense license. I'm
> maintaining a couple of open source python scripts under the MIT
> license and was toying with the idea of adding a user friendly GUI to
> them, Qt and PyQT are looking pretty good since Tkinter is ugly and
> almost all the other toolkits just fails abysmally under Win64
> environments. Now I ran into a little bit of a snag, I can not find a
> similar exception list to the GPL license for PyQT as for Qt itself.
> The only thing I did find was
>
http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/static/Docs/PyQt4/pyqt4ref.html#license
> ... except the wording "If you use the GPL versions then your own code
> must also use a compatible license." could be interpreted either way,
> compatible with GPL, or compatible with the license for Qt itself,
> which *does* allow for MIT license. Oh how I hate licenses...
> 
> Could anyone clarify what that last sentence refers to? I want to
> interpret it as it's free for the MIT license, but of course I'm
> slightly biased.

PyQt has the same GPL exceptions as Qt does. Note that even if you use a
license covered by those exceptions you have to accept additional GPL-style
restrictions.

Phil


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