Re: An Economics Perspective to the Open Source Movement
Trolltech and the KDE Foundation negotiated an agreement several years ago which made Qt source available under the GPL. Both Qt3 and Qt4 have been under the GPL for several years. If Trolltech went out of business, or took Qt totally proprietary then the KDE Foundation could take the last released GPL version and continue on with it without Trolltech support. When Nokia bought Trolltech and changed it's name to QtSoftware, it also added the LGPL license to the GPL and it's own commercial license. in order to make it more agreeable to proprietary interests. More licensing information is here. As far as the LGPL is concerned my views are similar to those of the creator of the GPL and the LGPL, Richard Stallman.
On a side note ... During the last 2 years of work I had the pleasure of working with a brilliant young man who was working part-time on his PhD in Economics. His code was outstanding! My own areas of expertise include Physics, Math and Biochemistry, subjects I taught at the college level for almost a decade. We had lots of discussions similar to the one in this thread. It still amazes me when I think about the faith he has in the market to resolve all problems, even the putative market "solutions" violated the laws of physics. So, according to him, there is no energy shortage -- we will find what ever oil we need in what ever quantities we need it for the foreseeable future. Profit will solve everything.
Speaking of LGPL, does anyone know about Qt's trajectory (if there's any movement at all) for becoming closer to the GPL license than it is now?
On a side note ... During the last 2 years of work I had the pleasure of working with a brilliant young man who was working part-time on his PhD in Economics. His code was outstanding! My own areas of expertise include Physics, Math and Biochemistry, subjects I taught at the college level for almost a decade. We had lots of discussions similar to the one in this thread. It still amazes me when I think about the faith he has in the market to resolve all problems, even the putative market "solutions" violated the laws of physics. So, according to him, there is no energy shortage -- we will find what ever oil we need in what ever quantities we need it for the foreseeable future. Profit will solve everything.
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