Nokia spreading FUD?

[Jelle Hermsen]

Hiya,
It's really sad what's happening with Nokia. To me it just proves the 
point that important FLOSS projects are best off being governed by an 
independent foundation.  I'm not sure what this all means to the KDE 
QT Foundation 
(http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php ), but 
quite frankly I don't care much about the "commercial" side of things. 
I intentionally use the quotes, because I strongly agree with the FSF 
that "commercial" is a word to avoid 
(http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Commercial ).
FLOSS can be commercial, but I don't agree with David Wheeler that 
it's (almost) always the case. It's too much a spin on words and 
definitions if you ask me. It's a typical problem when you hijack a 
word and mix it up with several legal viewpoints. This creates a big 
mush in which you can 'prove' almost anything. When you look at the 
legal definitions of a word, you can only and exclusively use those 
definitions inside the specific domain it applies to. Lifting it from 
its context and trying to prove a much larger, 'universal' point is 
generally a bad idea, because it can create much haziness which helps 
nobody.

Regarding Qt, I can say I never really warmed up to it. When Trolltech 
finally managed to fix the licensing issues I already turned my back 
to it and never really returned. However, it is a real important 
project, and I sincerely hope the development of Qt won't be depending 
on all the dark business voodoo that's going on around Nokia.

On the supposed restrictions on the use of FLOSS in defense & 
aerospace I call a big "crap alert". You only need to point to the 
programming language Ada, which is an international standard and its 
major implementation GNAT is Free Software. GNAT is part of the GNU 
Compiler Collection and is used widely among aerospace & defence 
around the world. You only need to remind someone that the DoD itself 
created the language in the first place and opened it up.

Thanks for the blog post, it's great food for thought!

Cheers,
Jelle


On 2011-03-14 16:32:07 +0100 Matthias Kirschner <mk at fsfe.org> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> just wrote a blog article about Nokia's statement where they announce
> selling the proprietary Qt business to Digia. 
> 
> I am interested in your opinion.
> 
> Regards,
> Matthias
>