Re: KDE questions
On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 08:36:56AM +0200, Michael Meskes wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 06, 2000 at 09:54:31PM -0800, Ethan Benson wrote:
> > its not debian who has copyright/licencing problems to deal with, its
>
> Of course not. I know where the problem is, I just hoped KDE had changed its
> license a little bit.
They haven't - and they'll have trouble doing it. The KDE developers don't
hold the copyright on all of their libraries and apps - for example portions
of libwv (http://www.wvware.com/) are used in KOffice. Both these are GPLed,
so anyone who distributes KOffice linked against Qt is not only violating
KOffice's copyright, but also libwv's. If the KOffice authors decide to
relicense KOffice to allow binary distribution they also have to Caolan
McNamara (the author of libwv) to relicense his library. This is just one
example out of many of the problems of relicensing KDE as a whole would
pose. The only real solution for KDE is to get Troll Tech to release Qt
under a GPL compatible license.
Remember - its all fun and games till someone loses a lawsuit.
Ian
--
Ian McKellar | Email: yakk(a)yakk.net | Web: http://www.yakk.net/
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