Betraying our Social Contract (was: Should we ship KDE in hamm?)
Am 22.07.98 schrieb dalla # pluto.linux.it ...
> MDS> If there are so many problem with copyright and license, why not move
> MDS> all the KDE packages to non-free?
Marco Budde <Marco.Budde@hqsys.antar.com> wrote:
> There#re no real problems.
That depends on whether or not you consider plagarism and fraud to
be real problems. The KDE authors certainly don't seem to think so.
I think they're being careless.
I say this because for years we've been told by the KDE folks that they've
given all the permission that's necessary for KDE to be complied against
Qt and redistributed. But for reasons that never were clear to me,
they were reluctant to actually state this in their license.
After being told that my concerns were groundless, I decided to double
check some of the comments in the /usr/doc/kdebase/copyright files, about
the lack of license information in kde binaries. While the situation
is still confusing, I found a number of programs which had copyrights
which would prevent distribution in programs built using Qt.
These are:
kvt (in kdebase)
kdvi (in kdegraphics)
kghostview (in kdegraphics)
some kmedia pics in kdelibs
kmidi (in kdemultimedia)
kscd (in kdemultimedia)
kppp (in kdenetwork)
kfloppy (in kutils)
Other people have found other problems. Specifically, Francesco Tapparo
independently found a lot of the same problems I did, as well as a problem
with krn (it's linked with libgdbm), and a problem in mimesupport which
is used by several kde programs (it's not free software: it has a license
restricting its use ).
By distributing these programs without authorization from their authors,
we are betraying our Social Contract, and oh by the way we're breaking
the law (and encouraging others to do so).
This isn't exactly what I would call "no problem".
To be fair, I should add that one of the bigger underlying problems
(shipping programs built from GPLed code and non-free software) is
NOT unique to KDE. We're doing it with a number of other GPLed programs
in contrib. Unfortunately, the copyright files we supply usually don't
even mention the non-free software's copyright.
We have to do better than this.
--
Raul
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: