RE: [Gnumed-devel] Qt licensing issues for GNUmed

[Tim Churches]

address@hidden writes:
> Sent: Tuesday, 12 August 2003 4:33 AM
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: [Gnumed-devel] Qt licensing issues for GNUmed
> 
> 
> > 3) The alternative is for GNUmed to acquire at least one 
> license for 
> > Qt for Windows (Enterprise edition with the database 
> bindings) - at a 
> > cost of about AUD$4000, plus at least one commercial 
> license for PyQt 
> > - at a cost of about AUD$500. Now both of these could only be 
> > installed on a single machine, but they permit the free 
> distribution 
> > of the Qt runtime
> 
> Well, a single machine means that the number of developers 
> that could work 
> on the Gnumed GUI would be cut down to one. It might actually 
> be not very different from the number of people that work on 
> the GUI right now -but, as far as I remember we wanted gnumed 
> to be *open* and growing. IMHO that includes freedom of 
> accessibility to the coding tools, too. And then, we need 
> *more* hands working on our project, not less. I might be 
> wrong, but during the last 12 months the mean 
> contribution rate per member in the CVS has decreased 
> considerably (with exception of Karsten who seems to work 
> night and day on gnumed). 

>From the development point-of-view, the situation with Qt is not
as bad as it first seems, because everyone can use the free 
Linux/Unix/MacOSX version of Qt to do GUI work. My understanding
is that these GUI builders save a .ui file, which is an XML 
representation of the GUI, plus stub code in C++. Both of these are
portable to Windows, where, if you have the commercial Windows version
of
Qt and the commercial version of PyQt, you can then load the .ui file
generated on another platform and build or test a Windows version of it.

But yes, it does restrict building and initial testing of Windows
versions
to one or at best a few people who have the quite expensive commercial
Qt and PyQt software. Of course, these people can then distribute 
no-cost runtimes so lots of people can do runtime testing of the
Windows builds. But still much less satisfactory than having a
completely free development environment.

And the licensing issues regarding the combination of GPLed GNUmed code
with commercial QT for Windows and PyQt for Windows remain. As I pointed
out in my original post, there are solutions to this problem, such
as dual-licensing GNUmed, but they are messy and may introduce other
complications.

Tim C