Qt Licensing And Programming In The Real

[wysota]

There is no Intellectual Property loss - they have published the information in a medium that is free to access by anyone.

If there is a car with doors wide open standing in the street, it doesn't permit you to take it and drive wherever you want just because it was put in a public place with free access to everyone. If you hack into a network or machine that is not protected you still commit a crime and you can't excuse yourself that you didn't force any securities. So what you have written here is not an argument. If you take a closer look at the reference manual available on the doc.trolltech.com website, you'll notice a "Copyright (C) 200x" text at the bottom of each page. And nothing is changed by the fact that this is the reference for the open source release of Qt - it's still protected from being claimed as your own.

Copying GPL code character by character using a keyboard into your own application is in violation with the licence and copyright, regardless of the fact that the code is available for public view.

As for books you can take the code and use it as you want only if the licence permits you. If I write a book and say that you can use the quoted examples in opensource projects only and you use the code in commercial application, I can sue you for stealing my work. Even if you changed variable names and reformatted the code. The idea is Free (as in freedom of speech), the implementation might be not (both as in freedom of speech and as in free beer). The fact that you copy the implementation onto another device or modify it slightly it is still the same implementation. Otherwise you could take KDE source code, spend a few nights retyping the code onto clean files, change variable names and then say "Hey, I wrote KDE! I own the code!" and release it under a different licence (for example BSD or proprietary). If you take Van Gogh's "Sun Flowers" and make a perfect (or imperfect) copy you can only say you made a copy of Van Gogh (explicitely mentioning his name). And copyright is about making copies, right?

[rushtontb]

We keep coming back to the same problem. There is no way any code that's been written since the 1960's is NOT a copy of some other code somewhere. If you're publishing a book containing example code, it will get copied into someone's application, commercial or otherwise. Think about every line of code you've written. There is no way any of it wasn't written and copyrighted somewhere else - because someone, somewhere, had to tell you what to type, most likely from a book you read. A thousand monkeys typing in Emacs for a thousand years might actually produce compilable source code, but one person doing it on one machine is not likely to do it without help.

Algorithms can be protected by patents. Example source code cannot. Why? Because examples are intended to teach. If I use an example - something clearly stating "this is an example" - you cannot (successfully) sue me because of how or where I use it. Software development would grind to a halt if your view is the true one; everyone would sue everyone else. The fact that this doesn't happen, and the fact that the marketplace for books of example code (including "cookbooks" and "recipe books") is pretty large, suggests that "example" code is different from "source code".

But hey, thanks for giving me something to rant about on a boring business day

[wysota]

The fact that two pieces of code are identical doesn't mean one is a copy of the other.

As for example sourcecode - take a look at Qt Quarterly examples, they all contain licencing information, the code is not public domain. Nobody forbids you from reusing the concept, but not necessarily the exact code.

God, how I love flamewars! And this time I didn't even start it!