[PyQt] My license mess

David Boddie david at boddie.org.uk
Mon Jun 22 11:28:10 BST 2015


On Mon Jun 22 09:21:26 BST 2015, Phil Thompson wrote:

> My personal opinion (I am not a lawyer) is that you can use whatever
> license you want so long as it is compatible with the other bits of
> software you are using. The files you mention are implementations of
> boilerplate code and you can't really write them any other way - they
> are almost like configuration files.

As far as I can see, the setup.py file and the files in the python
directory are basically just implementing the required interfaces in the
simplest way, which is really the only useful way to implement them.

So, since there's very little room for creative expression, I'd expect 
it
to be difficult to argue that the original implementations were even
copyrightable, and there are probably plenty of differences between 
these
implementations and the original ones. If someone started writing these
interfaces from scratch, they would end up with something very much like
the ones in the python directory.

My advice to the author is: if you still feel uncomfortable about those
files, start with an empty file for each of them and use the API
documentation to write them from scratch. I personally don't see that 
this
is necessary, but I understand if you want to go to the trouble of doing 
it.

Really, those examples should have been permissively licensed in the 
first
place. I don't remember why they weren't.

Thanks to Jorge for finding the current location of the Qt Quarterly 
site:

   https://doc.qt.io/archives/qq/

David


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