Re: Re: [Gnumed-devel] Movve to Qt (was: Conference)

[brendansweb]

Hello all. 

I have just joined this list. 
I am a lawyer in Sydney running an IT practice.  
I am interested in open source generally, and in health in particular. 

This thread looked like something I might be able to help in relation to, but I 
don't 
have its history. 

Could someone fill me in on the reason why people a dual licence is being 
considered for GNUmed and what the perceived gap is between the GPL and the 
requirements of the "other" licence? 

Cheers

Brendan

> Tim Churches <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 2003-08-13 at 22:44, Ian Haywood wrote:
> 
> > My $.02 on licensing: it is difficult to accede to demands from
> users of
> > 
> > closed operating systems
> > that we use a free GUI library on that system, nor to see what
> advantage
> > 
> > is so offered to said users.
> > (they *can* still develop, as the source remains GPL, Python is an
> > interpreted language so it
> > doesn't matter if the library is binary-only. Of course they need
> to
> > switch to Linux if they want to run
> > QtDesigner. Nice to see the boot on the other foot for once.)
> > Qt is GPL on Linux, so purists can be GPL right down to the BIOS if
> they
> > 
> > want.
> 
> I think that is a very reasonable position to take. However, there
> are
> still a few details to be addressed if GNUmed code is to be dual
> licensed under the GPL for non-Windows platforms, and under some
> other
> license for Windows. Ideally, that "some other license" should be as
> close to the GPL in effect (eg with respect to copyleft) as possible,
> but can't actually be the GPL, and which is compatible with the GPL.
> Anyone have any clues about a suitable, properly drafted license
> which
> meets these aims? The Mozilla Public License, with the two extra
> clauses
> needed to make it GPL-compatible, seems closest, although it
> implements
> only "weak copyleft", not strong copyleft like the GPL. But it is the
> strong copyleft in the GPL which prevents its use with non-free
> libraries like Qt for Windows, so I don't think you can have both
> strong
> copyleft and Qt for Windows without using some license which makes a
> special exception for Qt. My non-expert, unsolicited advice is the
> GPL-compatible Mozilla Public License (but renamed the GNUmed Public
> License - it allows that) for the Windows version.