Qt 3 and Qt4 relicensed as GPL v3
I read in Thiago Maceira’s blog that Trolls have relicensed Qt3 and Qt4 as GPL v3.
I still had no time to analyze how this will affect clam. Relicensing CLAM has proven to be a hard political and burocratic problem, but a transition from GPL v2 to GPL v3 is easier since we have the ‘or later’ notice, so we have the door open to that controversial upgrade. Definitely, trolls’ move to v3 is something that will boost the adoption scene.
A nice lateral consequence of this affects directly to one CLAM application, SMSTools, which still uses Qt3, and not Qt4 (althought Zack Welch started a temptative Qt4 port). Until now, Qt3 didn’t enjoyed the same nice dual licensing Qt4 has. Former Qt3 licensing was a modified GPL that had problems on using Qt3 for non-unix platforms such as windows. So with Qt3 relicensing we can now freely distribute SMSTools precompiled binaries for Windows.
Update: I read in the official announcement that they didn’t droped GPLv2, they just added a third license to the existing dual licensing so you can use one of three licensing schemes: non-free , GPLv2 and GPLv3. Definitely they want to make developers live easier, not just by building excellent API’s.