Re: A simple mistake (was Re: Should we ship KDE in hamm?)
Hi,
>>"Oliver" == Oliver Elphick <olly@lfix.co.uk> writes:
Oliver> Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
>> The Bern convention explicitely says, that if you have not a licence for it,
>> it is FORBIDDEN.
>> This is a matter of fact.
Oliver> I don't dispute it. The point is that if a licence is
Oliver> self-contradictory an English court will attempt to interpret
Oliver> what was meant. It will make as little change as possible to
Oliver> the actual wording in order to accomplish what it believes to
Oliver> the intention of the licensor. It will almost certainly not
Oliver> accept that a meaningless licence is meant to be
Oliver> meaningless. [This is by analogy with practice in Contract
Oliver> cases.]
I fail to see how it is relevant. Where do you see a
meaningless license? The KDE people have given the right to
distribute the code under the terms of the GPL. If you can't satisfy
the GPL, no rights are given. What is meaningless about it? Seems
pretty straghtforward.
Of course, the GPL requires that everything needed to build
the KDE code, including interface definitions, be also distributed
under the GPL. (Still pretty meaningful). We, however, do not have
the right to distribute the interface definitions which are part of
Qt under the GPL, so we can't distribute KDE binaries (this, gains,
succeeds in being meaningfull).
As to libraries, the intent is that the program be usefull,
and that means that anything required to make the program work on the
system should be freely available. Whether that means static linking,
dynamic linking, telepathy, hyperlinking, is incidental; the GPL is
trying to ensure the program shall work on a users box, that the
program sources are not held for ransom (ok, so I stretched the last
bit), that the source is available so it can be fixed, and the fixes
distributed back to the community.
The English (british?) court should look at that when
deterining the intents of the licensor (why else whould they
have used the GPL?)
manoj
--
Death carries off a man busy picking flowers with an besotted mind,
like a great flood does a sleeping village. 47
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@acm.org> <http://www.datasync.com/%7Esrivasta/>
Key C7261095 fingerprint = CB D9 F4 12 68 07 E4 05 CC 2D 27 12 1D F5 E8 6E
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