Re: KDE REWARD OFFERED

[Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>]

"Carl B. Constantine" <carl@os-s.com> writes:

> On 6/9/2000 15:49, Steve Greenland at stevegr@debian.org wrote:
> 
> > 1. The GPL is not compatible with the QPL - software released under the
> > GPL may not be linked with Qt and then distributed.
> 
> That's in Binary form. What about just distributing the Source (the (L)GPL'd
> part) and leaving it up to the user to compile and link to Qt. I don't see
> this as violating the GPL in any way.

Source packages are a pain (I know, since I'm responsible for creating
qmail-src), and binary packages are available elsewhere anyway, so a
source package would not actually benefit people much, and would be a
maintenance nightmare.

Also, I'm not sure where you'd put a source package, given that the
source generates a non-distributable binary it seems wrong to put in
in main, because it would be the only source in main with licensing
problems.  Equally putting the source in non-free also seems wrong
given that it's GPL.

Finally, distributing the source would probably be taken as an
endorsement of their misapplication of the GPL, so even if we could
legally get away with it, I don't think we should.

> At this point it seems to me this holy war is more of an emotional thing
> because of past violations and the fact that Debian seems to just hate KDE
> and won't allow it into the distro no way no how.

I don't think that's the case at all.  I think that it's mostly just
apathy (I've certainly not done anything to get kdelibs back into the
distribution, despite the fact that its under the LGPL and is
therefore OK to distribute).

If someone has uploaded a kdelibs package, and it's been rejected,
then I think that's bad, but I've not heard that that's happened.  If
on the other hand nobody bothered to upload kdelibs, then that's the
reason it's not in the distribution.

Likewise, if someone uploaded a KDE package with a license of the form:

  This package is distributed under the GPL, with the added permission
  that you may link this code against Qt and distribute the resulting
  binaries.

I'm sure that it would be allowed into the archive.

Surely that proves that the problem is not hatred of KDE, but simply
resistance to the idea that we should ignore their misapplication of
the GPL.

Cheers, Phil.