Re: Your petition to GPL Qt

[Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org>]

[ I took the liberty of reformatting your message to fit a text display
and be more readable in the process. ]

On Sat, Dec 19, 1998 at 02:49:27PM +0100, Avus wrote:
> > Essentially in the end the headers and whatnot will read "This
> > application is licensed under the GPL.  We also allow linking it to
> > code licensed under the QPL version 1.0".
> > 
> This shouldn't be neccessary, when considering your first statement. If
> an "implicit declaration" is enough in the first case, it is also in
> the second. I'd suggest to ask the authors of borrowed code to give an
> explicit *permission* to link it to the QPL, and to allow to change the
> license in an "legal emergency", i.e. in case of a lawsuit. The reasons
> for not appending the above clause:

But the above _IS_ necessary for the code which has been ported to Qt and
is under the GPL unless the QPL is compatible with the GPL without the
above.


> o license additions should be avoided, if they are not necessary (says
>   RMS) 

Yes, too easily someone will say if it's GPL even modified GPL it should
be compatible with the GPL.  If you are allowing things the GPL prohibits
in some cases (allowing the linking of something that isn't normally
allowed you don't interfere with GPL compatibility, however if you link
other GPL code with into this, the additional permission doesn't apply to
the plain GPL parts.  When you link GPL and X licensed code, the X
license does not apply to the GPL'd parts, the GPL does.  Since the X
license terms are less restrictive than the GPL and not differently
restrictive as with the Artistic license (which isn't compatible) you can
pretty much consider the whole work to be under the GPL's terms, however
you have no right (as others have pointed out) to make the GPL apply to
the X licensed code.

Adding a restriction the GPL does not will render your almost-GPL code
incompatible with the "Real" GPL.  This can get nightmarish.  If the GPL
is not suitable, write your own license or use another as a starting
point.  It'll be better for all.  (Another argument why Troll Tech can't
just "use a modified GPL instead of their own license" which has been
suggested more than a dozen times in private emails)


> o the legal situation is far from clear: Caldera, Mandrake, SuSE,
>   DLD etc. have considered distributing KDE as it is today legal (qt as
>   system component). It's not tolerable to implicitly accuse them of
>   illegal actions now by requiring a licence change. Debian is just a
>   party with its own interest in this debate, not a judge (legally,
>   maybe morally they are)

Actually, lawyers do it all the time and even more often, people indicate
they believe someone may be doing something legally wrong.  Debian
believes that at best calling Qt part of the major components of the
operating system (compiler, kernel, etc) is shaky at best.  RMS does not
believe Linux has any non-free major system components because it was
built from the ground up not to have them.  So yeah, I think there's good
reason for Debian to believe that these dists are doing something wrong
legally, however I personally will leave the moral judgements to others
as I can only cast judgement on myself.  I suppose someone could ask a
lawyer, but one lawyer means little.  You could ask two lawyers, but
you'd get two different opinions.  No way to know till it goes to court
and frankly none of us wants that.

Debian tends to be very cautious about license issues because we are not
a commercial entity.  We have no legal department and if someone sues any
of us, they're probably going to go after individual developers.  They
might go after SPI instead or in addition.  Essentially, we're in the
habit of covering our arses because if we don't, nobody else is going to.

I can speak for my personal morals if someone would like, but I cannot
speak for each of the other Debian developers as their beliefs are as
diverse as those found here.


> o morally, a simple consent of the author is absolutely enough o until
>   the decision of a court, "in dubito pro reo" has to apply, i.e.
>   nobody can be considered guilty or threatened (although that may be
>   common in many US civil cases)

Perhaps, but if you accept one you're opening yourself for problems. 
They may not be legal in nature but they will be problems.  Someone will
have a serious problem with their code being relicensed without their
consent.


> o it is not clear if a modified GPL is still compatible with the GPL,
>   in all cases. Some people will argue that it is not. If a developer
>   wants to use code under "modified GPL", does then the whole work have
>   to carry the license addition, even if Qt is not needed there? Or
>   take a qt-programme with a modified GPL, that is temporarity 'linked'
>   to a "pure GPL" programme without Qt calls, is this legal (note that
>   this is the "plugin case", which is unclear anyway). For another
>   example look at the p.s.

See your first point above and my reply to it.


> I could go on on with such examples literally for hours. Much of the
> trouble is due to the GPL v.2 being unclear, vague or partially made
> obsolete by technical progress (e.g.Corba). Thus the complexity of GPL
> discussions is usually divergent.

I agree to a point.  RMS has the ability to rewrite the GPL to suit
changing trends in the computer industry.  Already there are issues which
the widespread acceptance of the Internet has caused to be changed. 
Issues such as source code availability have come up.  The Debian project
is huge now, we are finding that some mirrors are mirroring only part of
the distribution, often just the binaries for certain architectures
because they just don't have that many gigabytes of HD space.  It could
be argued that you can still get the source "from the same place" (the
internet--specifically one of the primary Debian mirrors and most of the
others) but as I recall the GPL isn't really written to count the net as
a distribution channel anyway.

Changing times could really cause a changed license to be usful.


> The point of all this was to demonstrate that we gain nothing with such
> a license addition, and have potentially continuing trouble. This is
> obviously a bad thing (unless you intentionally *want* KDE to have as
> much trouble as possible).

On the contrary, I'd rather fix the problem at the source since the
Trolls are willing to work with me as much as they can and we'll fix this
thing together and right the first time.  It is my sincerest wish that
anyone who is willing to accept the GPL as free software (BSD people tend
not to consider it "totally free") will consider the QPL to be free as
well, and those who do not consider the GPL to be free software will
understand why Troll Tech needs to retain the right to sell their product
for use in non-free software because they can't make a living on tech
support alone.


> So I am against such a license change and in favor of a more informal
> consent of the authors. If an author does not agree, the respective
> programme should not be in the Debian packages, unless Debian
> officially grants Qt the 'system library status' to use the respective
> exception clause in the GPL. For other distributors, it's their own
> responsibility to make sure they don't violate copyrights.

Debian needs this consent in writing and according to our Debian Free
Software Guidelines the consent in writing must not apply only to Debian.


> > I was told a long time ago this was what debian wanted ( before QPL was
> > mentioned ).
> Yes, they expressed it in their annoucement to drop KDE. Unfortunately
> Debian didn't mention the system library clause and why *they* didn't
> want to use it (DFSG don't allow non-free libs to be part of the
> system). The announcement gave the impression that the expressed reasons
> were universally (and undisputedly) valid, which was IMHO quite
> offensive to other distributors.

We didn't?  Hmm, I do not recall.  <digs>  Yes, we did mention it
actually.  We mentioned that others claimed it was enough and whether or
not they were right, it didn't apply to Debian then or now.  It could
apply in the future and in fact at least two people have suggested that
we could use it if Qt were DFSG free, GPL compatible or not.

Of course, three or more people immediately objected to it and we had a
nice "discussion" about it.  For the record, I was among those to object. 
We didn't like others using it before because some of us didn't believe
it applied and others of us wanted it not to apply because Qt was
non-free.  To change our minds about this because Qt is going to be free
suddenly would be wrong and many of us still believe that it doesn't
apply in the case of Qt.

I'm not in the mood to give Microsoft more ammunition about our "blatant
disregard for intellectual property" (you wait, they will try that one
sooner or later) so as I said before, I'd rather do it right now to avoid
needing to redo it later.



> p.s.:
> What if a KDE lib (LGPL) that doesn't use QT is (at the same time)
> linked to a 'regular' KDE app ("modified GPL") and a KDE aware app using
> e.g. K.Tk ("pure GPL"). The LGPL'd KDE lib has to "fall back" to the GPL
> (for the "pure GPL" app) *and* to the "modified GPL" (because of the KDE
> app). Of course this is nonsense, as the GPL doesn't cover running an
> application, but that won't detain people from using this argument: If
> those two apps would have to be run at the same time, you can argue that
> there is the clear intention to break the GPL in the described way when
> distributing it, therefore distribution is illegal. Unlikely? Alan and
> Raul stated the same when arguing against the legality of a KDE source
> distribution. "there is the clear intention to link to Qt (with
> alternatives not yet working properly), therefore distribution is
> illegal." 
> Things like this are not very relevant at the moment, but when more
> non-qt KDE apps are developed and KOM/OpenParts will be used with other
> toolkits, this may quickly become a hot topic. And even if such claims
> are void, it may again lead to a lot of bad feelings in the community.
> (Guess we should better use LGPL for everything)

You're scaring me.  =>

-- 
NO ONE expects the Spanish Inquisition!