On Thu, Nov 19, 1998 at 05:53:58PM -0600, Merlin Mas. of *NIX wrote: > > I do not understand all of this bad humor over the Qt License. If it is > truly open source and compatible with the GPL, great! If not then, to > hell with it, let's get on with working on other things. A license can be truly OpenSource and still incompatible with the GPL. The original BSD license is such an example. If you've been keeping up with the discussion you should have seen that determination by now. Although, keeping up with the discussion on it has been problematic for me and I'm used to massive amounts of email. If you've not really tried, I can understand why you might say that. Still it looks more or less like you want a definitive answer before anyone has had a chance to really interpret it and that you're not willing to waste your time on helping things move constructively. I hope that was not your intent. The QPL is essentially the GPL with restrictions on mods and patches (at the moment all mods must be patches--OSD and DFSG compliant but NOT GPL compatible) and the rest of the GPL rewritten without lawyerspeak and attempts to translate. The license may or may not be able to be pure GPL compatible, but based on the discussions of where the problems are, proposed solutions are being figured out. > KDE has a nice familiar feel to it, and I think that some of that feel > could be incorportated into future efforts, sch as making KDE completely > open. As for Gnome and Harmony, I think that those efforts should be > continued regardless of Qt's status. These are GPL with truly "safe" > status, plus the fact the GPL written code is usually better than any > commercial toolkit anyway: techically or otherwise. Methinks thou dost protest too much. Harmony isn't GPL, it's LGPL. If anything, the QPL will be nicer to free software than Harmony's LPGL because Qt will be limited to Free Software whereas Harmony could be used with anything. I can see a reason for Harmony still, but likely it will die because the primary reason for it was to provide a really free Qt. Well, now there will be one. Gnome must continue. KDE needs competition. KDE must continue. Gnome needs competition. > Red Hat does have a few advantages over Debian source packager, but that > can be fixed. Most of the problems that I have encountered with Debian > installations has been the ease of use of the frontend for the package > manager. Redhat's source packages have advantages over Debian's? What the HELL have you been smoking? Debian's source packages are pristine upstream tarball, easily viewable diff file, and a PGP signed md5sum file telling you what the package does! Redhat's source packages are a proprietary file format requiring custom tools and you have source and patches already applied, leaving you pretty much to trust the person who packaged the thing not to have put anything nasty in there, intentionally or not. You're saying that Redhat's package SYSTEM is better because they have a nicer front end for it? I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. Debian can get a new package manager front end program, and in fact there is already a lot of work making one. But claiming that their source packages are better simply because dselect sucks is blatantly NOT TRUE. > The strength of Linux comes from the fact that it can take the best of all > worlds as far as code is concerned and use the best bits, so I think we > should concentrate effort in making things better than engaging in > what appears to be pointless worries over this or that. "Pointless worries" as you put them has made Debian second only to Redhat in terms of marketshare. And why is Redhat bigger? Certainly not because they ship CDs with configuration utilities suid root and executable by all (they have had 3 such instances of this in recent time, all 3 can be found on Freshmeat) They're bigger because they have a marketting budget and they use it. Debian does not have a marketting budget. None of us are getting paid to do this either. We're here because this is the best distribution based on technical quality there is. We know it is because we work hard to make it that way and we're constantly improving it. We may not be the easiest to install. Most people try to install a distribution by simply telling the thing to install EVERYTHING. That just won't work with Debian because Debian offers too many choices. Are we going to give up the ability of our users to have those choices because it make the thing easier to install? The answer is probably no, we won't. But we will do other things to make it as easy to install as we can. That's just the way we do things. -- Show me the code or get out of my way.
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