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Legal
Posted: Sat Mar 12 2022 3:47 pm
by RickF
As someone who has dealt with Qt company legal myself in various licensing issues, what is the current thinking by developers about the use of QWidget and other terms. Are there potential copyright issues that need to be address?
It seems like refactoring the names, while a pain, would help eliminate any confusion in that area.
Thoughts?
Rick
Re: Legal
Posted: Sun Mar 13 2022 3:24 am
by barbara
what is the current thinking by developers about the use of QWidget and other terms. Are there potential copyright issues that need to be address?
Thank you for asking such a good question.
CopperSpice is licensed under LGPL 2.1 as derivative work of a project which was under the same license. Names of classes or variables in a published API are not subject to or protected by copyright. In fact, the API itself is not protected by copyright.
I guess a company could file a trademark for a "class name" but it would most likely be rejected by the patent office. Even if it somehow did get granted, there would be no way to enforce it in this scenario.
Our team considered multiple alternatives and changing the class names did not seem effective. Users moving to CopperSpice have existing applications and some of the code bases are really large. Asking them to change class names would be a heavy burden and possibly a steep learning curve.
If you have other questions or concerns please let us know.
Barbara