ANNOUNCE: Ice 2.0 released

[Diez B. Roggisch]

> 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