Re: Should we ship KDE in hamm?
On Sat, Jul 18, 1998 at 01:55:31AM +0200, Richard Braakman wrote:
> I couldn't find a good mail to reply to in the KDE thread, so I figured
> I'd write a new one and set a relevant subject while I was at it :)
>
> The license issue seems controversial at least. Personally I would
> be willing to assume an implicit exception for Qt in the KDE license,
> except that the KDE developers refuse to add that exception explicitly.
> They've had ample opportunity.
>
> But the other point I wanted to mention is that we may not want to
> distribute these KDE binaries at all. They're version 980312-8, which
> by now is very outdated. I think we'd look silly releasing those while
> everyone is still talking about the 1.0 release.
>
> So maybe the technical issue can defuse the philosophical one :)
> By the time slink is ready, Harmony might be usable.
>
> Richard Braakman
>
I concur that the best option is to remove kde. My main concern is that there
is some gpl code
==> not written from the kde people <==
This is a very big problem: if we distribute kde, we, as all the debian users
which redistribute kde, violate even the copyright of perhaps unaware people.
I made a little research about the copyrights in the kde packages:
-- There are a lot of programs that use GPL code of other authors.
-- As the Andreas Jellinghaus say in most /usr/doc/kde*/copyright files:
"There is neither a global copyright statement, nor copyright statements
in every file, so the situation is unclear."
-- Kvt use code that does'nt permit explicitely modification and selling.
-- ksasteroid is based on some other source, situation unknown (cited from
/usr/doc/kdegames/copyrights).
-- kreversi is a gem: in /usr/doc/kdegames/copyright there is the following:
This code is freely distributable, but may neither be sold nor used or
included in any product sold for profit without permission from
Mats Luthman.
But kreversi.lsm say that the package is under GPL!!!
-- mimelib use the particularly restrictive copyright
/usr/doc/kdesupport0g/mimelib/LICENSE.gz (no selling and other
restriction on the use of the software). This is the description field of
the kdesupport0g package:
Description: mime, uuencode and QwSpriteField library - runtime version
This libraries are used by several KDE applications
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Personally I think that we begin to violate too much copyrights[1] for a package
not even in the distribution, and I think so not only for legal reasons, but
for moral reasons too.
Francesco
[1] not only because kde is in contrib, but even because the QT license
require that the software is freely redistributable and modifiable.
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