[Paraview] GPL and Paraview and Qt

[Clinton Stimpson]

When you say "extend ParaView" it isn't clear to me whether you plan on 
writing code that uses Qt or not.
Do you mean some dlls will not use Qt, and your custom one will?

Clint

Bonnie Smithson wrote:
>
> 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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