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Posts: 963 | Thanked: 626 times | Joined on Sep 2009 @ Connecticut, USA
#13
Originally Posted by wmarone View Post
Fracturing it like that would be a surefire route to killing it. All the successful BSD projects have a defined trunk, regardless of being able to be taken proprietary as that's the only way for such a project to survive.
While I do agree that having a single common trunk is the best option, I'm not sure I agree that spawning several slightly incompatible QT-derived tool kits would be good for MS. We are talking about developer tools, each with a different name/trademark, not OSs.

Originally Posted by wmarone View Post
MS would love a BSD Qt, they could take and borrow stuff freely without concern of license violations or having to contribute back to the developers.
I doubt this too, frankly. But, it is possible. I just don't think that the benefit they would get from it could compensate for the level of threat of having a viable, top notch, cross-platform, tool kit in the market.

Originally Posted by wmarone View Post
The worst thing that can happen is he tries that and KDE decides to force the issue and fork it. They can take the GPL and LGPL license and run with it. No BSD license, no proprietary licensing schemes.
The worst thing for who? For MS? I don't think this is their worst case scenario.

Originally Posted by wmarone View Post
Much like other unresponsive managing bodies (that passively or actively ignore user complaints, like XFree86), they can be bypassed by virtue of the license. You'll have to change the name, but like LibreOffice and Xorg, it will become the new trunk and the old, dead branch will wither.
I could live with this scenario, but I am not sure it is the best that can be had.
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