Hello everybody, I'm alarmed that some people want to pull KDE out of hamm. I'm not in favour of that. As long as it's not in "main", I'm quite happy with it. There is debate over whether or not they are violating the GPL license. I don't believe that it is our decision to make. This decision should be made by the persons who wrote the code that is being sampled from (it is their license, after all). In many cases with the KDE stuff, no code was sampled from non-KDE sources. So who are we to tell the original authors what sort of license they put on their code? One persons interpretation of the GPL (or any license) will be different from anothers. We should not be in the business of providing alternative interpretations of the original authors intentions (as written in their licenses) - except perhaps in situations where we could be legally liable for damages because of the original authors really wierd views on the law (ie. Dan Bernstein's views on copyright law). A lot of work went into the KDE packages. I think we should respect that, and not play politics with them. Not only that, leaving them out will damage the marketability of Debian. We don't have to be so darned rigid with our principles when we are dealing with stuff outside of "main". Before pulling the packages out of hamm - I'd like to have the developers vote on it. I suspect that the people who want to pull KDE are a very vocal minority. Cheers, - Jim
Attachment:
pgpXtHNHwEnxG.pgp
Description: PGP signature