[Insight-developers] Licensing

[Stephen R. Aylward]

Dear Trolltech,

We have three questions concerning your licensing.

Background

I am president of a non-profit consortium that promotes open-source 
software for medical image analysis.  Our website is
http://www.InsightSoftwareConsortium.org
An introduction to our mission is available as a presentation in our 
freely available journal.  The presentation is archived at
https://caddlab.rad.unc.edu/MIDAS/bitstream/1926/161/21/1-ISC-OpenSource.ppt
The journal is available at
http://www.insight-journal.org

Our projects follow a BSD-style license for open-source.  In particular, 
our libraries can be freely downloaded, modified, used, or redistributed 
for open-source OR commercial endeavors, without any compensation coming 
to us or our developers.   Our developers span the globe and are 
volunteers - that is, they are not paid for their contributions to the 
toolkits, and they come from academia and industry in over 30 countries. 
  For the record, my position as president is also unpaid. 
Nevertheless, by using BSD-style licensing we have receive outstanding 
community support for our efforts.  The best example of our success is 
the Insight toolkit, www.itk.org, for medical image analysis.   It has 
become the standard tool for 3D medical image analysis research in 
academia and industry.  It has spawned several popular open-source 
development tools such as cmake (www.cmake.org).

The Issue

People are asking us to provide routines that support the integration of 
our libraries with QT.   Since documentation is extremely important in 
open-source efforts, we would also need to demonstrate the use of those 
routines by providing example applications.  However, we are concerned 
that developing and distributing QT routines and demonstration 
applications would change the entire licensing terms for our toolkits 
and would require the purchase of QT commercial licenses for some or 
possibly all of our volunteer developers.

The Questions

1)  If we included QT routines and demos in our libraries then could all 
non-QT components in the library remain BSD licensed?  For example, a 
user of our libraries would only need to attain a QT commercial license 
if they intended to use the QT-specific routines and demos for a 
commercial product; while the commercial use of the non-QT components in 
the library would be available under BSD licensing and available for 
commercial use without compensation.

2) If the answer to the above question is Yes, then may we develop, 
include, modify, and distribute QT-based library routines and 
demonstration applications with our libraries without acquiring QT 
commercial licenses for our volunteer contributors in academia and 
industry?   For example, groups (in academia and industry) receive 
grants from the US government (typically the National Institute of 
Health) to conduct research and development, and those groups 
occasionally use our toolkits.  Do you consider US government grant 
funded research and development that does not specifically produce a 
commercial product, and that instead contributes to a BSD project or 
generates a scientific publication, to be a commercial endeavor?

As a non-profit organization releasing code for medical use, we are 
extremely concerned about liability lawsuits and licensing.   However, 
we feel that our efforts are worth the risk, because we strongly believe 
that science is best advanced when data and methods can be shared. 
compared, extended, and used.   We hope that we will be able to work 
with you and the outstanding QT product to continue to advance this 
important field.

Thank you,
Stephen

-- 
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Stephen R. Aylward, Ph.D.
President of The Insight Software Consortium
http://www.InsightSoftwareConsortium.org
Chief Medical Scientist at Kitware, Inc.
http://www.kitware.com