[Paraview] GPL and Paraview and Qt

[Bonnie Smithson]

Hello,

 

I heard back from Trolltech today about Qt.  I told them that since I was
building a commercial, in-house application that I didn't need to get the
commercial version of Qt.  Anne (see below) disagreed with me.  She said
that in-house, or out of house doesn't matter.  It is whether or not we
would post the source to our changes back to the open source community.

 

Can someone please clarify the implications of GPL?  If I extend Paraview to
invoke our commercial applications via a custom .dll, I could make Paraview
extensions available, but I wouldn't make the custom .dll available.  Is
this complying with GPL?  We wouldn't be reselling the SW - only using it
in-house.

 

We will be adding enhancements to itkSnap and Paraview at least, if not vtk
and itk.  And we would be able to post those to the open source community as
long as we can have some custom .dlls which we don't share.

 

Do I understand this correctly?  If we did want to sell an app that depends
on vtk .dlls, other than keeping the copy left in place, am I free to do
this?

 

- Bonnie

 

  _____  

From: Anne Tsirfa [mailto:Anne.Tsirfa at trolltech.com] 
Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2007 2:49 PM
To: bonnie.smithson at otismed.com
Subject: Qt licensing 

 

Hi Bonnie,

 

It was nice speaking with you earlier today.  Thank you for taking my call.

 

 

As I was mentioning, Trolltech offers dual licensing model for Qt. Depending
on type of application that you're building, you need either open source
license or commercial one. 

 

You can get detailed licensing info on our web site, here
http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/licenses/licensing/licensingoverview

 

To sum up, as a rule of a thumb:

 

a)       If you call into Qt's API - you need a license. 

b)       If you want to use Qt Open Source Edition, you must comply with
GPL, which among other things, states that you must contribute all your
source code to the open source community.

c)       If you are building proprietary software - you need to start
development with Qt commercial license. You can't start developing
proprietary software using Qt Open Source license. 

 

It would help if you can provide me with more details about your project and
how exactly you're using Qt and Paraview. Based on what you told me so far,
it sounds like you guys do need Qt commercial license.

 

 

And, finally, our pricing info can be found here
http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/licenses/pricing 

 

Since you are saying you will only need Qt for GUI part, you need Qt Desktop
Light Edition.  1 license with 1 platform support is $1,990.

 

 

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions, and also let me
know how wee proceed. 

 

P.S. Also, as an FYI - you might want to check with Paraview to see whether
you can build proprietary software using Paraview's application. 

 

 

 

Best regards,

 

Anne Tsirfa,

 

desk: 650.551.1676 x 135

cell:  650.793.0501

 

CODE LESS, CREATE MORE!

 

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