Re: Can we pull KDE?

[Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>]

> It's something of a concern to me to see a free software project
> be so hostile towards another. We can hardly afford to be fighting.

I think you're over stating the case here.  The ``hostility'' you mention is 
not really aimed at KDE as a whole.  It is specifically aimed at their abuse 
of the GPL on two counts:

  1)  They GPL their code, and (used to) claim that this makes binaries linked
      against Qt were distributable as a result.  I think Steven Kulow accepts
      that this is wrong, so we should soon see a modified license to address
      this issue.  Once that happens, this problem goes away.

  2)  As a consequence of their previous interpretation of the GPL, they have 
      felt empowered to take other peoples GPLed code, and include it into 
      their non-GPL (as it turns out) programs.  This is a much more serious 
      problem, which probably is the source of most of the tension here, but 
      is addressable by either getting explicit consent, or dropping the 
      packages in question from the KDE project.

It seems that some of the KDE developers prefer to ignore these two problems, 
whereas the Debian developers tend to be rather sensitive about licenses 
(since license terms are what defines our distribution) so the two groups tend
to come to differing conclusions when looking at the same data.

That's not a problem.  KDE can do their own thing, and distribute things from 
their sites with any old license, but likewise we can do our own thing, and 
decide that if the license doesn't pass muster, we won't touch the package.

I think this argument has reached this conclusion several times already.

Hopefully, a more useful result will occur once we do drop the packages, 
namely the KDE developers who currently consider this to be irrelevant, will 
sit up and pay attention when about 50% of their target audience becomes
less available (that figure is based on the slashdot poll showing that debian 
accounts for about half the people that don't use RedHat).

Then perhaps they will start licensing their code under a license we can use,
and using the code of others only when they have a valid permission to do so.
At this point our mutual problem will be solved.

The alternative is to have a monthly flame fest until the end of time.

I know which option I prefer.

Cheers, Phil.