Re: Can we pull KDE?

[Ward Deng <wdeng@KachinaTech.COM>]

> On Tue, Sep 08, 1998 at 04:19:44PM +0200, Anselm Lingnau wrote:
> > Hamish Moffat writes:
> > > The GPL specifically lets you link against standard system components,
> > > free or non-free. That means free software can be linked with Sun's libc,
> > > as well as with Motif etc on Solaris systems. It couldn't be linked with
> > > Motif on a linux system because Motif is not standard on linux systems
> > > (Debian at least).
> > 
> > On the other hand, Qt is standard on various Linux distributions (most
> > notably S.u.S.E.). This would make it legal to distribute KDE binaries
> > for those distributions under the GPL standard library exception.
> 
> Hmmm. I guess it would. All the best to them, then; I won't trade in
> freedom for a license to use Qt.
> 

I have a suggestion after I read all postings of this topic.

Can we have a commercial company to distribute a "commercial" version of
Debian distribution with Qt as its bundled components? In this way, some
programs with licensing problems can be avoided. People can choose to
use "pure" official Debian distribution or buy a commercial version based
on Debian. The company will return a percentage of the sales to Debian
project.

We simply do not want to see less software supported on Debian. Although
we hope every free software program is licensed under GPL but the reality
is ... (you should remember what the author of xpdf said a few days ago)
And we found many users (even advanced users) like the idea of having all
useful packages installed out of box. For example, Caldera packaged 
netscape 4.04 in their COL 1.2, which pleased a lot of our users, while
many users complained about missing pine binary in the Hamm distribution.

Actually we at Kachina have intention to help distribute Debian with many
scientific software packages. However, we have not decided how to achieve
it. We do not know how RedHat, Calera and SuSe dealt with licenses like
pine, xv. I am curious if they need to sign agreement with each author to get
permission to distribute it.

Thanks,

--ward