Re: KDE liscence question
Francesco Tapparo <cesco@goldnet.it> writes:
> I do'nt have Messiahs: I think with my head. If the opinion of Alan
> Cox and RMS is that we should donate the code the KDE people use illegally,
> they are wrong, imho. I've explained my reasoning at the end of my letter.
The KDE people didn't use any code illegally to my knowledge and I
don't think you know of any code that was stolen. The only illegal,
i.e. license bvreaking, thing KDE does is link against qt. That
linking is the problem together with their choise for gpl and nothing
else. The linking with the qt breaks every single line of the up to
now released code, because its all gpl. Its not only part they reused
from other people.
> So I summarize my point of view:
>
> If *you* work hard to solve the problem of the KDE people, you are curing
> the sympthom, not the cause. In doing that you are pressuring some people to
> donate some code to the KDE people, or grant them some rights they woul'nt
> be entitled to have. So you are solving the troubles *they* created.
> This is the first problem: your message (not only to other potential
> developers, but even to the lot of companies willing to earn in the linux
> market but frighten from sharing their code) is
>
> Hey much of our code is GPL'ed, but if you link it against a more
> restrictive library (and if you have a lot of mindshare) we do'nt care;
> or, in the worst hypothesis, we work hard to solve your problem.
>
> This message can be very dangerous to the community.
The current message is far more dangerous: Hey, write free software so
we can bann it. Thats what you are doing instead helping to resolve
the problems.
Asking everyone who contributed to debian for a license change is
exactly the right thing to do, because they should have never used
that license in the first place, because of the gpl and qt. Its not
fixing the symptoms but correcting a break of the license each and
every author at kde did.
May the Source be with you.
Goswin
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