Re: Debian i386 freeze
> You know the difference between license and copyright, do you?
I believe so.
> I don't think, the GPL has something to do with the FSF directly.
> Maybe the text of the license if copyrighted by the FSF, but the code,
> that is under the license, that is copyrighted by the FSF is not
> copyrighted by the FSF, but under the copyright of the author, that
> put the code under the license, which is copyrighted by the FSF.
>
> I hope, I got that right! ;)
Well, I don't know how things are in Germany, but here you can't copyright
the text of a copyright license. It's strength lies in the fact that it
is a license agreement -- if you change it, it's no longer a license.
It's common practice around here to take a license, change a few lines,
and use the result. At least, that's what I've been told.
For free software, it doesn't (shouldn't) matter who holds the license,
because it's free. [As long as the license holder has a strong respect
for that freedom.]
> I think, it's definitly enough, if you have! I mean, that's the good
> part about free software programming! You sit down 6 hours a night and
> hack something nice for other people and all they do is whining about,
> how much you know about licenses! I think, this is going to be a good
> threat for every new young developer, that would like to contribute.
> DON'T USE GPL! Noone understands it, but everyone tries to.
There are already some people who hold that opinion. And there are people
who don't use the GPL. (Take bind for an example.)
But the GPL doesn't do anything to guarantee your rights to distribute
code which has been linked against some other non-free code. As an
author, you have those rights -- no one can take them away from you
(you can sell them, at least in the U.S, but that's a different matter).
But the GPL doesn't pass those rights onto anyone else.
If you want to distribute your code linked against non-free code,
I'd suggest you use perl's Artistic license. Or if you don't want your
code to be distributed against any random proprietary code, but
only want to allow it to be distributed with Qt as the non-free code,
include with your code (where you say what the license is) a statement
that it's ok to do so. For example:
"This code is freely distributable under the terms of the GNU Public
License with the added exemption that anyone may distribute binaries
linked against Qt if all the other terms of the license are met."
> > That said, I'll remind people of something else: we try to maintain
> > good author relations. If the author doesn't want us to distribute
> > software we generally don't, even if we're legally allowed to.
> Hey, you're talking to me? As I stated while closing the bug, we're all
> talking about: I (as member of the core development group for KDE) allow
> debian to ship binaries. You're allowed to refer to this and my old mail
> in case of beeing sued by me or any other KDE developer.
Of course, if anyone sells a cdrom with a copy of KDE on it, under the
terms of some license, the customer can sue the seller to satisfy the
terms of the license if the seller didn't meet all the conditions that
the license requires.
See that sentence above, that I put in quotes? Quote that back at us,
and say that you're going to put this into all the GPL'd KDE code, and
the problem is solved (at least for KDE going into contrib -- there's
other stuff in contrib which has just the GPL on it, and I think we
still need to deal with a lot of that).
But we need that exemption, and I don't think I've ever seen any one of
KDE's authors come out and say that they were providing that exemption.
[I have seen statements that the GPL already provides that exemption,
but that's just an inaccurate opinion about the GPL.]
Thanks,
--
Raul
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