Re: Can we pull KDE?

[Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>]

I just checked the ftp.debian.org bug list, and was surprised to find that the 
continued presence of KDE has not been reported as a bug already, so I've
just done it.

The way I see it is that regardless of the finer legal points (like whether we 
could get away with distributing KDE because nobody will sue us), KDE are
abusing the GPL in a way that devalues it for the entire Free Software
community, by spreading the rumour that you can link GPL code against
proprietary non-modifiable code.

As standard bearers for the Free Software community, I think Debian should be 
discouraging this abuse of the GPL, and the only sanction we have is to remove 
the packages from our archives.

Steven Kulow did agree over a month ago to fix the licenses on the packages.  
Obviously he's going to have a problem with those packages that include third 
party GPL code, but for the 100% KDE packages, he should be OK.

The fact that he's not yet done those uploads would seem to mean one of three 
things to me:

  1)  He's been busy doing other things
  2)  He's been having trouble convincing the other KDE developers of the need
      for a license change
  3)  He made the promise in the hope that the issue would go away.

If 1) is the case, then the removal of the packages will hopefully prod him 
into uploading the packages, and the problem will be solved.

If 2) is the case, then our removal of the packages will give him amunition to 
argue that the licensing issue is not unimportant, which may persuade the 
others to go along with a license change.

If 3) is the case, then maybe he'll decide to take the issue more seriously 
once we remove the packages.

Anyway, I've reported a bug, please would one of the ftp.debian.org maintainers
make it so.

Cheers, Phil.

P.S. Steven, this isn't a personal attack --- I'm just fed up with the way 
that this issue keeps flooding the lists, and see the (hopefully temporary)
removal of the packages as the easiest way to let everyone get on with 
something useful instead.  I hope you've just been too busy to get round to the 
uploads, in which case you can solve most of the problem yourself (except the 
third-party GPL thing)