Re: Can we pull KDE?
Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> writes:
[...]
> 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.
This is true. And I second to remove the offending packages from
ftp.debian.org.
On the other hand the KDE people are free to change the license
conditions on the software they wrote. As I understand it, so far a
written message of the author in which he expresses his intent to
change the license to a free one was and is good enough to include a
package with a non DFSG license. I would rather not like to change
this. (e.g. I am working on such a package right now.)
I think it is the package maintainers duty to see if there is a
problem with the license(s) (the above mentioned package I am working
on contains > 800 files of C code and I found at least 5 different
licenses and copyrights of which some still have to be cleared).
I cannot second a full removal, though.
KDE's developers are free to choose the toolkit they want and the
license they want. If it is free in the DFSG free sense, there is no
problem for us. If not we can't distribute it. Full stop.
So instead of proposing full removal, please take care to only file bugs
against the programs with bogus licenses.
Everything else is bug terrorism.
Jens
--
Jens.Ritter@weh.rwth-aachen.de grimaldi@debian.org
KeyID: 2048/E451C639 1998/01/28
Print: 5F 3D 43 1E 24 1E CC 48 1E 05 93 3A A7 10 73 37
"Das ist halt der Unterschied: Unix ist ein Betriebssystem mit Tradition,
die anderen sind einfach von sich aus unlogisch."
-- Anselm Lingnau in de.comp.os.unix.discussion
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