This question is appearing again and again on community meetings, mailing list and other channels. For example on Together portal in year 2014: https://together.jolla.com/question/52712/licensing-issues-with-sailfishsilica-qt5 . But I was not able to find satisfying reply from Jolla, so I have to ask again:
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What is license of Silica components? Package details says “Proprietary”, majority of components qml files contains BSD license, headers from
sailfishsilica-qt5-devel
package have LGPL 2.1 license… - May Jolla publish source code of native part of UI components? It would be great to have possibility to run Silica applications on desktop Linux, it would boost development of application UI. Silica components may not fit to other platforms, but basically it would allow to use Silica applications on other mobile platforms (Plasma Mobile, Ubports…).
Why I am asking again?
As I am licensing my application under terms of GPL license, by loading proprietary libsailfishsilicaplugin.so
at runtime, I am violating terms of the license, right? It may be solved by relicensing to LGPL or adding some linking exception, but still, I would like to clarify if I have problem or not.
To ability to use Silica components on desktop, did someone investigated what functionality is provided by native code in libsailfishsilicaplugin.so
? How hard would be to write it again with some OSS license? Or should I focus to write alternative UI in Kirigami?