I think there is something that is being forgotten here. Corel are shipping several things, but presumably they are only dynamically linked. So the reason why they need a licence exemption isn't that their frontend is derivative of lib-apt, but rather that the copyright on lib-apt would require the `whole work' - ie, all the things which are bound together at runtime - to be licensed under the GPL.
However, of course, lib-apt isn't the only thing that is bound together at run-time with Qt in this program. dpkg is too - the fact that the interface is program call rather than dynamic linking is an irrelevant technical detail. (This case seems similar to the one where Next wanted to ship GCC with their own Objective-C frontend, but not to release the frontend under the GPL. RMS had his laweyrs write to them and Next changed their mind.) I'm unlikely to be happy to make a licence exemption for Qt, as I have stated on numerous previous occasions. Can someone please send me contact details for someone relevant at Corel, so I can talk to them about it ? I'll try to be nice to them :-). Ian.
