-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi guys,
I asked for a summary text of all licensing information which needs to embedded into an application for legal reasons before, and I got the IMHO not really satisfying answer to simply use the aboutQt dialog. (what if I want my own with some info about my own app added? why is it so hard to put the required text in some complete, easy to copy form on the homepage of Qt as well?) Anyway, I followed the pointer and looked at the aboutQt dialog of Qt 4.8. I compared it with Qt 4.8 licensing as described on http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/licensing.html to see if its contents hold up to it. Please note IANAL. But it seems the dialog is incomplete in various regards, which puts everyone who relies on simply showing that dialog on a legal risk. Therefore I suggest the following issues to be corrected as soon as possible, given a lawyer agrees after a review that those are indeed a problem as I'm just guessing here: 1.) No full LGPL license text: The LGPL 2.1 as per section 5, 6 appears to require that an application includes copyright information on any LGPL libs it depends on (no matter if statically or just dynamically linked), *and include the full LGPL license text*. Quote: "You must give prominent notice with each copy of the work that the Library is used in it and that the Library and its use are covered by this License. You must supply a copy of this License. If the work during execution displays copyright notices, you must include the copyright notice for the Library among them, as well as a reference directing the user to the copy of this License." The about dialog contains Qt 4.8 copyright information, but not the LGPL license text. This means every application linked to Qt would need to include it and add a note to the about dialog on where the file is exactly, so the user can read it. The website link is void, because the LGPL requires that you supply a copy of the license along with your application. 2.) PySide 1.2.1 is not in aboutQt at all This is PySide-specific, but PySide is also LGPL, but it doesn't bother to add itself to the about dialog. So any application just relying on the about dialog will also violate the PySide LGPL. 3.) Apple contributions to Qt 4.8 are not covered in the about dialog. The licensing of those contributions includes: "Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution." Since Qt itself is just a lib and cannot pop up such a dialog randomly, the application needs to take care of this. And again, the standard provided aboutQt dialog doesn't fulfill those conditions, so applications appear to be again at a loss if not fulfilling this. 4.) qt3to4 contributions are not covered in the about dialog. (I'm assuming they are part of Qt 4.8? The licensing page doesn't really specify this) The licensing of those contributions includes: "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." I'm guessing legally, "copies or substantial portions of the Software" includes binary distributions. In that case, again Qt cannot display this on its own without relying on the application, so I guess the application would need to fulfil this and again, this would really need to be in the aboutQt dialog? 5.) No mention of Easing Equations by Robert Penner. Again it isn't quite obvious if those are included in standard Qt 4.8, but in case they are: The licensing of Easing Equations includes: "Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution." Again, the standard Qt about dialog lacks both the copyright and license text as asked for by the licensing. 6.) Catharon Code is missing from the about dialog. The licensing specifies: "If you use it, or only parts of it, in a program, you must acknowledge somewhere in your documentation that you have used the Catharon Code. (`credits')" Again, the Qt dialog doesn't mention it. I suppose Qt includes FreeType and with that, Catharon Software as well? Please don't take this purely as an annoying nitpick. I would really ask you to keep in mind that those issues possibly affect EVERY Qt program where the author relies in good faith on the accuracy of the aboutQt dialog to safe him from legal trouble and to fulfill all copyright & licensing display issues. And I guess that's about every Qt program out there. Therefore, please consider passing this on to some legal person from Digia or to someone else who can actually do something about this! (again I am not a lawyer, I cannot suggest what would be a correct solution, just point out what APPEARS to be faulty) It would be really awesome if for the sake of everyone using Qt without a huge legal department behind them, the aboutQt dialog could be fixed. Also again a huge sorry for bothering if all those issues are wrong and the dialog is sufficient. Again, I'm not really qualified to say if the dialog is legally wrong or not. Regards, Jonas Thiem PS: I only examined the Qt 5.x dialog very shortly, but it has a similar obvious possible issue: it doesn't contain the full LGPL text either, and also it doesn't refer to a file on disk shipped along with the application that contains it. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJTQILGAAoJEBIDTbbx8Ykee6wQALk01Q2ryAPKBDh6jOEX21iM tBA+WjI2Fop2CTRIxW9K0XROqcd187zFwQ/CdR8jycfsdBPuEcjwkI3Ce5+5+FqM XN42qftdme7u9HMKE6tBgRzpISmu5PUWzr8ChX3aZpbkheExCDUtibrSuoOdxBz9 OFmF7EG2AwAQOWQvJjlEZrVCEN64gXOtBhGlQrBxbmZkCG0P3OUUfswwhmL3HMTW pcJJWOGaIupwOoubKzIYrZlVJughTG9vHd0ltR3p0hoGzHUFOXZ+I6/q1ecYgGTP kJkbRxqznsfPk1tuCQHhWSNHAq4n6kXLW1rcSbqx3LGYJAPeSYvD0ZtScC8EOUmM cBvrQEUYtGD2Z05VgrLq785L/DjAaLt9zqcgmymoS0/LJdxrGZYERf/alk+Vws7U aA6R7Y7ISZbmMB4h02otRmFA8yTbXslBaSGQIliXxr/wZU/isIciMImgz2yIJrqd 68pCfjWkPz02MTlq7Y36jfUfVu3BLzIp0mI3qaKmitJboxsftaxCma3EsWew2Iav LBl50DW8kYoHoymokwwiiCfIIPTyNdiO69RRqSw/1ON6awN4lUxSRpTeqlrTd0kz FGqGaRy3h0U6geU42Qx7BqFssaMNCgdTIn6pRN4CLCyE0widbvSegpFAa7zkQDE0 U7WxIpTGZZKsgMWD6eyG =zc3k -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Interest mailing list Interest@qt-project.org http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/interest
