On Sun, Oct 11, 1998 at 12:25:27PM -0700, Alex wrote: > [..] > > And lots of people haven't kicked stuff back. Why doesn't *BSD run on an > > SGI Indy - its because the BSD license didnt force all the neat stuff > > to be contributed back. And there are thousands of other examples like it. > > I fail to see how this is all that much different from the GPL > perhaps scaring off a comercial entity from contributing code. Of course > I don't have a specific example off the top of my head :) The GPL has a "feature" that with the exception of essential system type libraries (which is IMO far too vague to be terribly useful) any work derived from the GPL must also be under the terms of the GPL. Not necessarily GPL, but the same terms. The other stuff can allow more (LGPL for example) but not less (Motif for example). Of course, Motif was a really hairy example because some places like Solaris, Motif is considered a system library! So you can use Motif some places and not others with GPL code? Essentially yeah. The GPL "feature" that all derived works must be "pure" is quite frustrating and only the GPL has that "feature". What happens when GPL code is written for use with something not under those terms then? Much of KDE is written from scratch, after all---as is lyx and a few (dozen) other programs I could probably think of with some time. According to the letter of the GPL, when combined with these things the software is undistributable. Certainly that's not what the authors want, so it's been generally assumed that they did want you to distribute things linked together like that or they wouldn't do it themselves. It seems that because of the way things are working out, that's not going to be enough anymore. =< It wasn't really enough before, but now clearly it's not. Of course, it's Debian's position that just because that permission is implied with things like lyx for example, things that were otherwise free like ghostview don't have that implied permission. That's the biggest reason I was part of the consensus that said we needed KDE to clarify the license or we couldn't distribute it after the license issue was reported as a bug. Stephan Kulow was going to bring it up with everyone else and try and get some resolution out of it. No resolution happened. So months later, we decided that we had probably no other choice than to remove it until the license was at least addressed. Well you can see where that's gone. It's made a BIGGER mess of everything and it's no closer to getting the right things done like asking the ghostview people if it's okay to use their GPL code with Qt. FWIW, I'm not certain still if that "feature" in the GPL is good or not. It was put there with good intentions, but it's clear there's a reason the GPL is the only license that requires these hoops be jumped through. > > > Your "the world outside of GPL is evil" attitude is quite bogus. > > > > I don't know where you got that from. But its not my attitude. > > I get that feeling from this whole thread, but perhaps that's just me. The whole thread is proof what a mess this whole thing is. I'm glad at least Stephan will continue to make debian packages, but that's not the way I wanted this to end. Most of Debian does not believe KDE is inherently evil (though I won't lie to you and claim that I don't believe at this point that a few of the KDE developers simply don't WANT any resolution) though I'll admit a few of the Debian users and at least one or two developers have had nothing but nasty things to say about KDE itself. I probably would have given up on the whole KDE project if I didn't believe that at least a few developers (more than a couple of which have contacted me by email in response to my slashdot postings) are at least concerned by this. As far as I am concerned, the majority of KDE which is written by KDE completely has no problem--you'd not have written it for Qt if you didn't intend it to be used with Qt. (duh, how did I ever arrive at that conclusion? Those who haven't make me wonder...) But the included parts of other GPL applications, that's more an issue. I know nobody really wants to go around asking everyone "hey, you mind if we use your code with Qt?" especially when in a majority of cases the answer is going to probably be "I don't give a rip as long as my name stays on it." I have offered before (many times now) and offer still to help if my help is at all desired. Course Harmony would fix the whole problem without asking anyone for anything, but I don't see that has happening real soon.
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