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December 10, 1998

   

 

Letters to the editor


Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@lwn.net. Preference will be given to letters which are short, to the point, and well written. If you want your email address "anti-spammed" in some way please be sure to let us know. We do not have a policy against anonymous letters, but we will be reluctant to include them.
 
   
Date: Wed, 09 Dec 1998 18:34:58 -0600
From: "David M. Stoner" <dms@atlantis.utmb.edu>
To: editor@lwn.net
Subject: Software Without Shenanigans?

A caveat needs to be added to John Martellaro's claim, in a 
"Mac Opinion" column, following Linus Torvalds, that only
open source software can produce "software without shenanigans".

Ken Thompson, one of the original creators of Unix, has shown
that even complete access to the source code cannot guarantee
the absence of shenanigans.  See http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95.
He demonstrated in some detail that a back door can exist which
is completely invisible in the source code.   His conclusion:
"You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself."

I agree that access to the source code does and should increase
our confidence in the system it generates, but it should not be
thought that it provides an absolute guarantee of trustworthiness.

David Stoner
dms@atlantis.utmb.edu
   
From: "Kenneth Y.K. YOUNG" <kyoung@kyoung.net>
To: <lwn@lwn.net>
Subject: Eirik's (President of Troll Tech) post to the Harmony List
Date: Fri, 4 Dec 1998 02:22:42 -0500

I haven't read any news item among the Qt hoopla that points 
out the following:

Eirik's (President of TT) unwillingness to guarantee not to 
sue Harmony involves several very deep opensource issues:
(1) He is wrong on one score: Harmony is LGPL'ed, and 
therefore can never be embraced-and-extended by any 
Redmond companies.
(2) There is a deep problem concerning Qt making money off 
Harmony patches, and/or loosing revenue due to a competitive
opensource clone.
(3) If TT one day does decide it is loosing revenue to a opensource
clone and sues, who is it suing and how can it sue?

I would like to see some concrete answers to these questions.

=====================================================

Quoting Eirik, President of Troll Tech, in his post to the Harmony list:

>We are not lawyers, we are developers, and we do not want 
>to sue people.  On the other hand I cannot guarantee that we will 
>never sue the Harmony project. Who knows what will happen 
>in the future. If e.g. some Redmond based company starts
>pumping funding into Harmony to "embrace and extend"
>Qt we might consider suing."        

   
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 1998 12:10:05 -0800 (PST)
From: James Ramsey <jjramsey_6x9eq42@yahoo.com>
Subject: Misuse of Troll Tech quote
To: editor@lwn.net

On the front page of LWN you excerpted the following quote from Troll
Tech's president:

"On the other hand I cannot guarantee that we will never sue the Harmony
project." 

Although you provided a link to the full article, you made it appear
as if a suit by Troll Tech of Harmony was a looming threat. The quote
was way out of context.

The following is a more complete excerpt:

"We are not lawyers, we are developers, and we do not want to sue
people.  On the other hand I cannot guarantee that we will never sue
the Harmony project. Who knows what will happen in the future. If
e.g. some Redmond based company starts pumping funding into Harmony to
"embrace and extend" Qt we might consider suing."

Now the "Redmond based company" is obviously an oblique reference to
Microsoft, and the likelihood of Harmony's developers accepting money
from Microsoft is pretty remote. The implication seems to be that it
would be unlikely that Troll Tech would sue, except under unusual
circumstances, such as some gross dirty trickery on the part of the
Harmony project of the sort mentioned above.

It doesn't sound to me like much of a threat at all.


----I am a fool for Christ. Mostly I am a fool.----


   
Date: 03 Dec 98 13:07:55 -0800
From: (anonymous)
To: editor@lwn.net
Subject: Comments on TrollTech QT, QPL


Dear Editor,

As you know, Linux has recently received high praise from press after
some heavy weight commercial companies have announced strong support
for it. For Linux to thrive and grow and become a household name,
support from commercial industry is vital. My main concern of making
QT to be a standard toolkit to base all free software is based on its
disregard for commercial software industry.

If QPL is perceived is an Open Source compatible and if almost all of
the free apps are written in QT, then most commercial companies would
also like to write their apps using QT so as to create common look and
feel and just to keep easier and greater compatibility with the other
free apps (like KDE desktop etc). However, this is a dangerous
situation.  What if sometime in future, some Microsoft buys TrollTech
and keeps the QT free license essentially same, but changes commercial
license drastically (let us say $50000 per developer per
year). Microsoft can further discourage others in using Linux (or even
Unix) by making the Windows version of QT essentially free for
commercial developer. Further, MS can allow QT at essetially throw
away price to commercial companies which agrees to get no less than
let us say 70 to 75 % revenue from Windows software. Note, that they
would least bit concerned, if developers frustrated by this license,
leaves Linux/Unix and starts using Windows.

The above scenario, however improbable, is definitely possible. This
would also almost kill commercial development of Linux-Unix software
and would be very harmful to those companies which invests heavily on
QT toolkit and helps it become a commercial standard.

Unless the QPL can take care of these concerns, it seems to me that
the commercial vendors would be better off using Motif. This will
create separation between commercial apps and free apps. I would
strongly advise the Linux community to take these concerns into
account before stopping their work on Harmony and GNOME projects.

In your previous article (http://www.lwn.net/1998/1203/a/jd-harmony.html)
Joel Dillon writes, "...if Trolltech were to go bust because of
Harmony then companies would see nothing to gain in cooperating with
the free software movement...". This is quite unlikely. Even after the
Linux has come in the market, we have not seen Sun going bust, neither
LessTif, has done harm to Motif, nor Wine has done any harm to MS.

Also in the same article Joel Dillon writes, "...at worst, if
Trolltech were to be bought out by Microsoft and raised their
commercial prices sky-high then some work would be involved in keeping
gtk or another toolkit 100% KDE-compatible...." This is simply
impossible.  What happens to the code already written in QT but
becomes incompatible with the the future libraries being
distributed. This would mean that either I as a developer renew my QT
license or ask my user to keep multiple version of QT lib on their
machine.

Couple of my own suggestions about QT: 
    
    * Make QT as a published standard. The free software community
strictly adhers to this published standard (once the published
standards are there, it would be difficult for TrollTech or any future
owner of QT to create any unreasonale distributions (e.g. Java).

    * Divide QT into QT Free ane QT Pro as two separate products and
QT Free to be released under QPL but with the exceptions that the
commercial vendors get the same right as the free software
developer. This would allow the commercial vendors to remain
compatible with the rest of the free software community without
getting locked into one company.
 

 

 

 
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