Re: Hardware respecting your freedom

[Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support>]

* Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> [2020-10-24 06:50]:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
> 
>   > Something like that. Qt was dual licensed (still is)
> 
> Not in 1998!  Qt was nonfree, pure and simple.
> So I posted asking people to develop a free replacement.

Thank you for that.

I remember it was not free by inspecting the CD packages and reading
reviews about Qt not being free as I wanted to distribute and could
not.

From:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)
Becoming free software–friendly[edit]

With the release of version 2.0 of the toolkit, the license was
changed to the Q Public License (QPL), a free software license, but
one regarded by the Free Software Foundation as incompatible with the
GPL. Compromises were sought between KDE and Trolltech whereby Qt
would not be able to fall under a more restrictive license than the
QPL, even if Trolltech was bought out or went bankrupt. This led to
the creation of the KDE Free Qt foundation,[124] which guarantees that
Qt would fall under a BSD-style license should no free/open source
version of Qt be released during 12 months.[125][126]

In 2000, Qt/X11 2.2 was released under the GPL v2,[127] ending all
controversy regarding GPL compatibility.

At the end of 2001, Trolltech released Qt 3.0, which added support for
Mac OS X (now known as macOS). The Mac OS X support was available only
in the proprietary license until June 2003, when Trolltech released Qt
3.2 with Mac OS X support available under the GPL.

In 2002, members of the KDE on Cygwin project began porting the GPL
licensed Qt/X11 code base to Windows.[128] This was in response to
Trolltech's refusal to license Qt/Windows under the GPL on the grounds
that Windows was not a free/open source software platform.[129][130]
The project achieved reasonable success although it never reached
production quality.

>   > Gnome was a reaction to KDE to build a desktop on a completely Free
>   > toolkit, and was answer to KDE guys choosing Qt as a base for the
>   > desktop.
> 
> I also posted asking people to develop another free desktop.
> GNOME was the response.

Thank you. Few words and world changed.


Jean