Re: Debian i386 freeze
This whole topic has never particularly made sense to me but now I'm
totally confused! :-)
On Mon, 20 Jul 1998, Buddha Buck wrote:
> Since the MS and Borland libraries, and associated interface files, are
> normally distributed with the compiler (by definition, a "major
> component"), you could use them.
>
Why by definition? The company I work for buys Windows boxes by the
100's. None of them come with a C compiler. (For that matter neither do
most of the Solaris boxes.) But all of them come preloaded with MS
Office. Does that qualify as a major component for this purpose?
> What is questionable is if you could ship your program with proprietary
> MS or Borland DLL's, or must only use the ones that ship with the OS.
>
Where's the line? Microsoft claims IE is part of the OS. Can I link with
say wininet.dll from IE? It is now shiped with some Microsoft OS's but I
got mine by downloading IE.
> > I don't see how this is any different? Should we be warning the
> > people who port Moonlight Creator to Windows that they may be
> > breaking M$ or Borlands licence by distributing their binaries?
>
> The problem is that Qt does -not- ship normally with the major
> components of Linux, so that it doesn't fall under the same special
> exception.
>
> The same situation applies to Motif. GNU Emacs is all set to compile
> and run using Motif widgets. The code is already there. All that
> needs to exist is for a build-time option to be chosen, and Motif to be
> available. The FSF, however, has held the position that since SunOS
> and other commercial Unix ship with Motif libraries in the base system,
> it is OK to distribute GNU Emacs pre-compiled for Motif on those
> system. Since Linux does -not- normally ship with Motif libraries,
> Motif-enabled GNU Emacs binaried for Linux are not allowed.
>
I've heard that Suse and some other distributions do ship with qt. If
that is the case, is it exempt for them? RMS said Linux is just the
kernel so we can properly talk of the Suse OS or the Debian OS rather than
Linux OS.
Of course we are not so inclined, but could Debian simply declare qt a
"major system component" and end this argument? :-)
I'm sorry to say that to this layman, the line of reasoning in this
section of the GPL rather stinks of hypocrisy.
--
Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar@braincells.com>
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