Re: giving money to gnome

[Tyson Richard DOWD <trd@cs.mu.oz.au>]

Benedikt Eric Heinen wrote:
> 
> > 2) If they are not, then why would KDE be insulted at our choice of use
> > for donations from Lehman? KDE knows our contract and policy (I am
> > assuming) and therefore must realize we will always support free software
> > first. 
> 
> KDE people have a good reason to be insulted, since we are getting money
> from JF Lehmann for a *KDE* CD that just happens to have a Debian
> distribution on there as well. And now we are giving money, that we
> wouldn't get without KDE to KDEs competitor -- and we're doing this
> stating that we want to support a free toolkit (GTK).
> 

So you're saying they'd really go to all the trouble of putting Debian
on the CD if they didn't think it would add any value.  

Why don't they just give their donations directly to Debian then?

> 
> > The only way I could ever see this as an insult is if KDE was putting
> > their money towards the development of a free replacement library and we
> > didn't try to help them out (that even seems thin to me).
> 
> This is not the case.
> 
> 
> I wouldn't mind, if Debian were to give money from whatever source to
> GNOME, *EXCEPT* if that other source is directly or indirectly a
> competitor to GNOME. 

If KDE had a license that said money earned from sales couldn't be used
to fund a "competitor", it would fail the DFSG on grounds of
discrimination. But you're saying we should assume that there's an
implicit "no funding of competitors" clause. 

> In this case, this money should be given to something
> else - and there is still quite a bit left to do.

Why? Why can't we spend the money where we want to? Why do we have to
change what projects we support based upon where the money comes from?
Perhaps you'd like to formalize your arguments, e.g.:
	
	Any money we accept from a free software project will not
	be used to fund another project that might be in direct or
	indirect competition with it.

	Any money we accept from a tobacco company will not be used
	in a project that might help people stop smoking.

	Any money we accept from the US government will not be used
	to help encryption projects.

	Any money we accept from NASA will not be used to help projects
	that might be used on EC space missions.

	etc, etc.... where do you stop? Where do you draw the line?
	The only sensible place is to draw the line right at the
	beginning.

I've got a much better idea though.

	Any money we accept will be used to fund free software as we
	see fit.

> 
> Actually, why not donate the money from that KDE disk to develop a
> user friendlier version of dselect ?  That is something that Debian could
> REALLY use. Otherwise, if we're stating we want to support a free toolkit,
> then please, don't do it indirectly (by giving money to GNOME), but rather
> do it DIRECTLY (by giving money to GTK!).

But a Qt based system configuration tool is supposed to be part of KDE.
Sounds a bit like it might conflict with some of the functionality in
KDE. Remember, we don't want to compete in any way with the people we
owe favours to.

I would rather burn the money try to spend it using the rules you
suggest.

You are sending a clear message to the world that Debian can be bought.

-- 
       Tyson Dowd           # 
                            #         Linux versus Windows is a 
     trd@cs.mu.oz.au        #            Win lose situation.
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~trd #


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