On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 05:13:52PM +0200, Josip Rodin wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 03:16:43PM +0200, Stefan Westerfeld wrote:
> > What has been suggested by debian to relicense every line of KDE code to a
> > special purpose GPL with an extra addition. Although this is advocated
> > to be a solution of the problem, it is only theoretical: It is completely
> > impossible to convince each and every author/contributor that once in his
> > life wrote a line of KDE code to change his license. So in that respect, no.
>
> It's not completely impossible; usually copyright is retained (by the one
> who sent the patch) on non-trivial, major changes. I doubt you have several
> hundreds or thousands of those, per KDE program (i.e. per one program
> author/maintainer who'd have do the boring work, requesting license changes
> from those who wrote the patches).
>
> Another solution would be to rewrite those parts that contain other people's
> code. I doubt anyone would volunteer normally; however seeing that $3K
> offer, I wouldn't be surprised if someone does. :)
Well, I haven't seen to most obvious problem mentioned:
If the KDE project would change the license of the code they control from
GPL to GPL+clause, anybody would see that as a sign that there *is* indeed a
problem using GPL code with Qt. Once this view had been established, they
would no longer be able to use any GPL code without asking the author to add
this clause. That would be a major competitive disadvantage to KDE or Qt.
Or they had to establish and promote among OS developers something like a
GQPL, a GPL that includes this Qt clause. Would it be possible to come up
with such a license and make it compatible with GPL code ? I don't know.
Gregor
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