> I believe whichever road you take, ZeroC is going to find itself in > problems. If ZeroC merges the changes made by this/these person(s), > how can ZeroC now sell it under a commercial license, as closed source > (violation of GPL)? If you refuse to merge the changes, you have just > given them a strong impetus to fork. History shows XEmacs and EGCS as > two such examples.
AFAIK qt is licensed the same way. And there is nothing bad about forks - but they have to be GPLed too. Maybe you're not aware of an implication of GPL: A product _using_ a GPL'd library also has to be GPL. That means you can't develop a commercially marketed product on top of a GPL library - AFAIK the exact reason why the LGPL was created, so that you may not alter the lib itself and sell it, but at least sell software that _uses_ the lib. So all in all, it seems the GPL/Commercial license makes sense - it does for trolltech :) And there is nothing in GPL that forces you to integrate code you've been offered - otherwise, killing a GPL lib would mean to delete all from a CVS checkout and submit a patch from that - obviouly nobody would enforce that. -- Regards, Diez B. Roggisch -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
