[Paraview] GPL and Paraview and Qt

[Berk Geveci]

Hi Folks,

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.

However, some of the components of ParaView 3 depend on Qt. Qt is released
under a collection of licenses:
http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/licenses/licensing. 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:
http://paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView_III_and_Qt_licensing. I want to stress
that the restriction above is only limited to a portion of ParaView. Read on
for more information.

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.

- VTK (ParaView3/VTK)
- VTK extensions (ParaView3/Servers/Filters)
- Server manager (ParaView3/Servers/ServerManager)
- Python support
- Utilities (ParaView3/Utilities)
* Qt extensions* (ParaView3/Qt)
* Applications* (ParaView3/Applications)
(Everything not listed above do _not_ depend on Qt.)

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:
http://paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView_III_and_Qt_licensing

If you choose to use the GPL'ed version of Qt to do GUI development, make
sure that you carefully read the GPL license:
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html. There are also some very useful
messages in this thread.

If you are developing new VTK algorithms, you do not have to worry about any
of this.

If you are developing a combination of the two, I recommend clearly
separating the GUI components from the VTK components.

I hope this helps.

-- 
Berk Geveci
Kitware Inc.
28 Corporate Drive
Clifton Park, NY, 12065
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://public.kitware.com/pipermail/paraview/attachments/20070202/28dbaece/attachment.html