On Wed, 27 Sep 2006 16:03:05 -0700, Paul Lutus wrote:

> Ken Bloom wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, 27 Sep 2006 07:37:01 -0700, gregarican wrote:
>>> o - Are licensing terms a concern? Qt isn't totally 100% free, open
>>> source software if you are using it for commercial purposes.
>> 
>> You've gotta ask yourself, though: how would you protect a commerical
>> investment in an interpreted language that can't even be compiled to
>> bytecode?
> 
> Qt works with Ruby, but it isn't written in Ruby.

I know that. Obviously, there's no difficulty protecting your investment
in a commercial C++ app using QT. But I've heard the question about writing
commerical apps in ruby before, this point seemed related, and was curious
why anybody would try it. (Or whether anybody had come up with a way to do
it.)

I suppose if you were the NSA, and had good security protocols, you could
write secret code that would be distributed internally, and your security
protocols would protect your investment in the interpreted code,
but placing GPL terms on that code would come into conflict with your
security policy.

Section 6 of the GPL would seem to conflict with a security policy
designed to protect secrecy, since the security policy would seem to be
"further restrictions" on GPL rights. IANAL, YMMV.

Alternatively, you might care about QT being GPL if you intended to
license your ruby program under the Solaris license or any other
GPL-incompatible but otherwise free license.

--Ken Bloom

-- 
Ken Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/
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