> They may be afraid of the situation that some other authors run into with
> freely distributable packages. For example, Knuth's TeX package had some
> of the fonts changed by someone other than the author. While the Knuth
> does not care if the fonts are modified, he really cares that the
> modified fonts were of the same name as his fonts.
[..]
> While the Qt authors may have different concerns than Knuth does over
> TeX, the idea may be the same: modified versions may reflect badly on
> Troll Tech.
I really don't know why people keep referring to TeX, as a simmilar package
that cannot be modified: As you mention also, anyone can modify
TeX as much as s/he likes -- you just cannot call it "TeX" any more.
But I'm sure that if you were to take Linux-0.99, modify it a lot,
and then put it on a few ftp sites as linux-2.0.27, you'll be getting
a few angry emails too.
The important thing about Qt is that it _cannot_ be modified, whatever
you'll call the result of your efforts. This means, that, if you
move to a new system, that requires slight modifications of Qt to
be able to run nethack (or, that shows previously unnoticed bugs in Qt),
you will not be able to run nethack on that new system, whatever you do.
No such limitations apply to TeX.
This is also why we should not have main-tree packages depend on Qt.
--
joost witteveen
joost@rulcmc.leidenuniv.nl
joostje@debian.org
--
Use Debian/GNU Linux!
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