Hi Folks,<br><br>I would like to bring some clarification to the ParaView 3 licensing. First of all, ALL of ParaView 3 is released under BSD-style licenses. <br><br>However, some of the components of ParaView 3 depend on Qt. Qt is released under a collection of licenses:
<a href="http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/licenses/licensing">http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/licenses/licensing</a>. The developers of ParaView 3 all have the commercial Qt license. To be able to keep the BSD-style license of ParaView 3, developers cannot contribute (major) code developed using the GPL'ed version of Qt TO THE GUI COMPONENTS of ParaView. This is explained in more detail here:
<a href="http://paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView_III_and_Qt_licensing">http://paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView_III_and_Qt_licensing</a>. I want to stress that the restriction above is only limited to a portion of ParaView. Read on for more information.
<br><br>ParaView 3 has several components. The following list includes the directories these components are in. The ones marked with a * depend on Qt, others do not.<br><br>- VTK (ParaView3/VTK)<br>- VTK extensions (ParaView3/Servers/Filters)
<br>- Server manager (ParaView3/Servers/ServerManager)<br>- Python support<br>- Utilities (ParaView3/Utilities)<br>* Qt extensions* (ParaView3/Qt)<br>* Applications* (ParaView3/Applications)<br>(Everything not listed above do _not_ depend on Qt.)
<br><br>You can develop code that depends on everything but those marked with a * without worrying about Qt licensing issues. This means that you can develop code that uses VTK, the Server Manager and the Python engine without depending on Qt. Furthermore, once we release it, the plugin architecture will allow you to develop VTK plugins. The user interface for those plugins will be automatically generated. Therefore, the only time you have to worry about Qt licensing issues is when you want to write truly customized user interface components or build a new Qt-based application. In those situations, follow the guidelines listed here:
<a href="http://paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView_III_and_Qt_licensing">http://paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView_III_and_Qt_licensing</a><br><br>If you choose to use the GPL'ed version of Qt to do GUI development, make sure that you carefully read the GPL license:
<br><a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html</a>. There are also some very useful messages in this thread.<br><br>If you are developing new VTK algorithms, you do not have to worry about any of this.
<br><br>If you are developing a combination of the two, I recommend clearly separating the GUI components from the VTK components. <br><br>I hope this helps.<br><br>-- <br> Berk Geveci<br> Kitware Inc.<br> 28 Corporate Drive
<br> Clifton Park, NY, 12065<br><br><br>