Re: Don't know if it can help...
Thibaut Cousin <cousin@in2p3.fr> wrote:
> I found something that may help to understand the problem between
>Debian and KDE in the archives of KDE's mailing lists. Strangely they
>don't see the problem in the same way.
Amazing ;)
>If this mailing list is not the proper place for posting that, where do
>I post it ?
It's not. debian-legal would be a much better choice; I've set the
Reply-To: header accordingly.
> Here it is :
>
>> As far as I cant tell this isn't a legal issue. If QT is distributed
>> as part of a (Linux) distribution then the GPL grants an exception to
>> allow redistribution of GPLed code linked with QT. (See the special
>> exception part of clause 3 of the GPL). So it can be legal to
>> redistribute GPLed apps linked to QT even if the QPL is incompatible
>> with the GPL.
An old argument, and that's a *very* liberal reading of the GPL (and not
the FSF's reading, incidentally, and they wrote the thing). The
distribution of Qt would have to be distributed with a "major component"
of the operating system, and Qt is not anything like a major component
of Debian; that clause is there to allow GNU systems to be legally built
on systems with proprietary C libraries and such, which was the
situation before things like the Linux (and later GNU) C Library were
written.
If it were permitted to read this clause in this way, then I could take
a GPLed program, write a proprietary extension to it for which I kept
the source code to myself, call the proprietary extension a "major
component" of my operating system, and thus defeat the GPL. This is
obviously not the intent of the license.
--
Colin Watson [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]
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