Re: Was Re: KDE not in Debian?
On Jan 29, Andreas Pour wrote:
> > (3) real permission to distribute from the authors.
>
> I do not quite know what you mean by this, but if you mean that to
> conform to your practice noted above of confirming from package
> authors that packages can be distributed by Debian, I will see if I
> can get the core KDE developers to send you their approval that you
> distribute KDE code. Mail me privately please if you think it is
> worth any effort and I will get started on it.
It's a bit more complicated than that with some of the KDE software,
because the GPL does not technically permit the linking of software
against libraries that have licenses more restrictive than the GPL
(like the QPL, which has restrictions on for-profit use on Win32). If
all of the code in a particular KDE app is written by KDE members, all
we need is something like:
KFlarg is (C) 1999 Foo and Bar. You may use and distribute KFlarg
under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 (or a
later version, at your discretion). As a special exception, you may
also link KFlarg against the Qt widget library.
(I forget the exact phrasing we decided was appropriate; but, some
stuff that uses XForms in contrib uses it. I do know the "correct
version" is longer).
However, there are several instances of software in KDE being
repackagings of existing software, with some work to integrate it into
KDE (I am told KGV fits into this category). In these cases, because
not all of the work was done by the KDE group, we also need permission
from the author of the original software (GV in this case) to link
against the GPL-incompatible software.
[Personally, I think if you wrote the software yourself and link it
against Qt, it's pretty obvious from a legal standpoint that you
accept people linking it against Qt. However, if you take someone
else's software and do the same thing, I can't see how we (or anyone
else) can interpret that as "acceptable". A lot of people have made a
possibly erroneous assumption that authors like that of GV won't
consider linking against Qt an abuse, and there are plenty of fat
targets out there for a lawsuit (Corel, Red Hat, Caldera...).]
Chris
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