I would think they should be released a separately as the qt dependency changes the nature of the licenses being depended on, and a more free main branch would be preferable.
Qt is available under a commercial license, the LGPL, and the GPL. Can you elaborate on your concerns?
It is just that. It would be the most restrictive license yet used for anything required. If this was brought in, anyone distributing binaries will also have to make available the source code to the Qt that they used for example or not bundle it. Wxwidgets made sure those conditions did not apply to derived works distributed in binary form. The creators of Qt got dragged a bit towards it even being as unrestricted as the LGPL in the beginning. I had noticed that the licenses picked so far are all much less restrictive and had thought that was a deliberate choice to keep the software free to more uses without the burdens of the GPL
But the license of the bitcoin and bitcoin-qt code is still MIT, even though it links against an LGPL library. IANAL, but I believe this means that if you use the source to build a headless version (which doesn't link against Qt) there is no restriction on the distribution of the resulting binary.
We're statically linking BDB4.7 already. Read that license?
edit: to save some hunting, here it is:
Thanks. You did not save me any hunting however. I have of course read the Sleepycat license, in fact years ago and was quoting form it recently in another thread here, and reread it before posting in that thread.
I do agree it is the current most restrictive license being used by a dependency. In fact that is why I have said on irc to some that I had been thinking of removing that dependency. That really would not be that big of a project. That would be a silly project now though if another more restrictive one would go in. In fact the current distributions of the binaries for bitcoin are in violation of the Sleepycat license. It however would be very simple to remedy unlike the gpl licenses that require you to keep available the exact code you used for a number of years and not just point to another mirror of it.
I stand by what I said above, and I said it being fully aware of of the BDB dependance and it's license, and am not sure why you thought I was not.