Re: korganizer debian package (OT: licence interpretation)
On Mon, Oct 05, 1998 at 05:27:23PM +0200, Moritz Moeller-Herrmann wrote:
> I study law. And I can tell you that there´s not a problem with the GPL
> licence in the KDE project. Even if the GPL (read very narrowly and literally)
> prohibited the use of QT, every judge/lawyer would reinterpret this licence to
> allow the use of QT , if the author of kpackage used it to distribute his
> program. What I am trying to say is, a licence can be interpreted in many ways
> and one very important issue in the interpretation of any legal document is the
> intent of the author or the user of this document. As the author of kpackage
> didn´t want to ban anyone from using qt, his licences (the GPL) must be read to
> allow the use qt. No problem so far.
> Problems could only arise if another copyright holder´s rights were violated,
> for example if a second GPLd program were merged into kpackage, and the author
> of this program read the GPL in a much more strict way than the author(s) of
> kpackage. Then we´d have two licences (both of identical wording: GPL), which
> could be interpreted differently, because the people who use the licence have
> opposing intentions with their licence. Since you distribute a binary DEB file,
> the problem can´t come up.
> Hope to clarify the issue a bit!
I have one question to that - in what way does distributing a
binary suddenly resolve a licence conflict? According to the GPL,
GPL'd code can not be linked to QT; _only_ the author of a given piece
of code has the right to make an exception to that rule. Because the
original in many cases was not written for QT, no such exception is
present.
And just because it would most likely be struck down in court does not
make it legal. The exception still needs to be present if it is
intended.
Dan
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