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Re: Press release



On Tue, Jan 11, 2000 at 10:21:14AM +0100, Martin Schulze wrote:
> > My understanding is that the KDE people need to include a Qt exception
> > clause in their license (which is the GPL), and then we could put it
> > in contrib.  I know Joseph Carter was working with them on this for a
> > while, but he caught flak from basically all sides.
> 
> Joseph has ironed out the QPL2, but still an exception is required if pure
> GPL code is used.  That's what the KDE people are working on, for a while
> now...

Well I tried anyway.  At this point because of serious evil Troll Tech put
in the thing pretty much at the last moment (QPL section 6(c)) I pretty
much am suggesting at this point a complete boycott of Qt until such time
as they fix it.  Refusing to fix it at this point is stubbornness and
spite.

If that's not the case and they just can't be bothered to fix it, we
shouldn't be bothered to try and work around it.


> > I suppose we could mention that KDE packages are available at
> > http://kde.tdyc.com/, but are not supported by the project, and that
> > KDE 2.0 will be included if it does not have these licensing issues.
> 
> If they're not part of the distribution nor provided by Debian, they
> will not be mentioned in a press release.  We are also not mentioning
> non-free databases and stuff.

Nor should we mention it.  KDE is currently still violating the GPL.  They
know about the problem.  They claimed they fixed it.  They haven't.

Perhaps I am being a bit overly bitter---I have personally been through
hell and back to help them fix their legal issues over software I don't
use and don't even LIKE and still they won't do what needs to be done
simply to spite a few individuals..  But if they want to infringe
Copyrights or insist that we do the same because they just don't like a
few people, they deserve neither our support nor our time.

I've left the door open if they decide they care enough to bother to try
and fix their legal problems.  I've told them exactly what must happen.
If they want to do that, great I'll be happy to help.  Otherwise I don't
think we should be bothering.


What's for damned sure is that I won't even be considering Qt until I can
use it with plain the plain GNU GPL.  While I rather much dislike KDE, Qt
looks like a rather nice library and I'd personally love to use it in my
own code.  It's too bad I can't, especially because I know exactly why
they're refusing to change their license so that I could.

(If anyone else knows of a good C++ toolkit besides Qt please tell me!
gtk-- is ... well, not very good..)

-- 
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org>                 Debian Linux developer
http://tank.debian.net   GnuPG key  pub 1024D/DCF9DAB3  sub 2048g/3F9C2A43
http://www.debian.org    20F6 2261 F185 7A3E 79FC 44F9 8FF7 D7A3 DCF9 DAB3

<n3tg0d> has /usr/bin/emacs been put into /etc/shells yet?  :P

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