On Mon, May 29, 2000 at 05:12:52PM -0700, Alan W. Irwin wrote: > My personal apologies for the "emotional" above. I didn't mean in any way > to annoy you with it, and I should have thought some more before sending it > off. A less perjorative way to say it would have been "non-license" reasons. The reasons we don't distribute KDE packages have everything to do with licensing. > When I build pine debs from debianized source I certainly have no > intention of distributing them to anyone else, Pine is not free and, as far as I know, does not attempt to misrepresent itself as being so. > and I believe this would be true for virtually every ordinary Debian user > who built KDE debs on their machine. Especially if Debian specifically > raised the issue with them, If users need permission to distribute binaries they create from source themselves, it is not free software. > and let them know distributing KDE binaries they > created on their machine would not be consistent with the official Debian > interpretation of the GPL. Our interpretation on this matter has been the only one offered. No one has ever, using the language of the appropriate licenses (GPL and QPL), described how it is possible to intermix source under both licenses without violating the terms of the GPL. Instead, they have waved their hands and/or silently ignored the issue. > If you are arguing that Debian should refuse to distribute any GPLed source > which has the *potential* to be used inappropriately by a small minority of > users, This has absolutely nothing to do with what Joey said; you are putting words in his mouth. The GPL and QPL places restrictions on what users (licensees) may do with the software; we do not add to that. > It smacks of prior restraint on your users because you don't trust them > to follow the Debian guidelines. You are obviously not a lawyer, and it is irresponsible of you to bandy about constitutional law terms like "prior restraint" in complete ignorance of their definitions. You are a physicist? How do you feel when people spout off knowingly about what Heisenberg's Uncertainly Principle "really" means when they obviously have no grasp of basic mechanics, let alone quantum theory? How about the old Schrodinger's cat sawhorse? The likelihood of simultaneous collapse of every quantum waveform in a cat is ridiculously low. (Since *I* am not a physicist, I won't venture to speculate on how many orders of magnitude greater than the age of the universe we would have to wait before being 50% likely to witness such an event.) Debian is not a government and we have no power of censorship. Our charter is free software, and only free software is official Debian product. Any software which mixes components under incompatible licenses is inherently non-free. The GPL and QPL are incompatible as-is, and special additions to the licensing terms have to be made by the licensor(s) to make them free. -- G. Branden Robinson | The basic test of freedom is perhaps Debian GNU/Linux | less in what we are free to do than in branden@ecn.purdue.edu | what we are free not to do. roger.ecn.purdue.edu/~branden/ | -- Eric Hoffer
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