Re: Should we ship KDE in hamm?
Hi Stephan,
As Francesco points out below, there seem to be several KDE binaries that
use code written by people who are not members of the KDE team, that are
covered by questionable licences.
This makes the whole licensing issue rather more complicated (not that it
started out being particularly simple ;), and we unfortunately don't have
a lot of time to sort this out before the 2.0 release.
Others have suggested that the KDE packages in hamm are obsolescent, since
the slink versions are much more up to date and/or usable (is this true ?)
These two things make it seem reasonable to remove the KDE packages from hamm,
but I'd like to know how you (as maintainer of the packages, and a KDE core
developer) feel about this, before doing anything about it.
What do you think about this ?
Cheers, Phil.
Francesco Tapparo <cesco@mizar.debian.org> wrote:
> 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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