Rubenerd

I am a real fan of KDE, the desktop environment for Unix-like operating systems such as FreeBSD and GNU/Linux, and I'm also a fan of the Qt Toolkit upon which it's built. Qt is developed of course by the Norwegian Trolltech company and is released under open source and proprietary licences depending on your circumstances. I firmly believe this is the software development business model of the future because it gives the tools to the open source community while at the same time allowing the company to generate revenue for proprietary uses. It's also why I'm a fan of MySQL, even if it's not as cool to be one ;).

Anyway Trolltech have expanded the permitted licences you can publish your work under! From what I can tell previously you could release your work under the GNU General Public Licence 2.0 and before version 4.0 their own Q Public Licence, but now amongst others you can now use it alongside the BSD licence (1999 vintage) and the MIT licence. As a predominantly FreeBSD and OS X user this is great news because I've generally released my work under the BSD licence, and now I can do so with my graphical Qt applications :).

I applaud Trolltech's move and thank them for supporting the whole open source community. I'd buy them each a coffee or a beer, but Norway is a long way away.