On Thu, Jan 20, 2000 at 06:20:43PM -0800, David Johnson wrote: > > Essentially, if KDE doesn't want to play by the rules---and it seems they > > do not, they deserve EVERYTHING Troll Tech ever got (wrongly or otherwise) > > and a hell of a lot more. I will personally do everything in my power to > > see that lawsuits are filed against members of the KDE team for knowingly > > infringing Copyright law if I have to. > > But since you are not a copyright holder for any of the code in > question, you do not have the right to sue, as you are undoubtable > aware. And moreover, since the KDE code has been public knowledge from > day one, and none of these copyright holders has done anything about it, > what makes you think you can change their minds now? With the prominence > of KDE, I seriously doubt that they are unaware of the circumstances. No, but others are and at this point none of them are terribly happy with this continuing debacle. They would largely have been happy to let their code be used by KDE if anyone had the decency to ask them before doing so. Several of them would be willing to give KDE that permission today if they were asked. I even offered at one point to help do the asking. Was told it wouldn't be necessary because the GPL'd code in KDE would be replaced if not written by KDE and that everything would be Artistic (which is itself a shoddy license--KDE may as well have put it under the X license, which wouldn't altogether have been a bad idea IMO. I'm no longer willing to do KDE's legwork. I offered and left the offer open for more than a year. I see that KDE has no intention of ever fixing the problem, so damn them all. If they care so little they belong in the same category as Sun: wannabes who try to appear to have "Open Source" but when the chips are down all they really have is just non-free crap they're trying to push on us. And so long as the license terms don't allow redistribution, that's exactly what it is: non-free. (and I still believe this is a compound problem.. First that KDE doesn't care and is essentially ignoring this thread and second that Qt is not GPL compatible. I did offer a solution to the latter not two weeks ago. The former I can't fix. And short of a lawsuit, I don't know if anything or anyone can..) > In some ways though, I might be glad for a lawsuit. This whole issue > revolves around some vague (in some opinions) clauses in the GPL, and it > would be a good thing for them to be clarified in court. So far the only lawyer that's been heard from on this issue is the FSF lawyer, and then indirectly through RMS. Since KDE has no intention of resolving the matter, it NEEDS to go to court IMO. That will either force KDE to resolve the matter _IMMEDIATELY_ or it will tell us all that the GPLv3 needs to be published soon and fix the problem found in v2. -- Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org> Debian Linux developer http://tank.debian.net GnuPG key pub 1024D/DCF9DAB3 sub 2048g/3F9C2A43 http://www.debian.org 20F6 2261 F185 7A3E 79FC 44F9 8FF7 D7A3 DCF9 DAB3 "my biggest problem with RH (and especially RH contrib packages) is that they DON'T have anything like our policy. That's one of the main reasons why their packages are so crappy and broken. Debian has the teamwork side of building a distribution down to a fine art."
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