On Sat, Oct 10, 1998 at 04:56:23AM +0200, Marcus Brinkmann wrote: > Let me try to make some qualified guess about this: > > If KDE would add the permission note, they would admit that there is a > license problem, and they had to stop sucking in GPL'ed third party code > without explicit permission by the authors. They'd have to admit that there is at least a possible situation in which a binary of a GPL program linked with the Qt library might undistributable under the terms of the GPL. Which is true---in at least some cases, there is a problem. Debian and Redhat are two such cases. > Seems that KDE has either an attitude problem or they are scared that there > wouldn't be too much support for them if they had to ask for permission to > link with a non-free library each time they incorporate foreign code. The FSF at least, would deny such permission for certain. Most people who just released their code under the GPL because it's cool to GPL your code probably would not object to that exception however. The point being that it still needs to be asked for. If KDE is unwilling, all I can say is I hope harmony is usable soon, before a few of the core developers who want to be anal about it and pretend there is no problem at all kill their own project. To all of those who would simply say "KDE sucks, just use Gnome", I say if I wanted someone else to tell me what I should or shouldn't use, I'd run windoze. The fact that I choose not to use Qt has no bearing on my right to choose it if I wanted to. However, I wouldn't pretend that there is no problem at all with using the GPL and Qt together. KDE has known about this problem for some time now. That they haven't even tried to address it saddens me a great deal.
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