On Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 07:46:52PM +0100, Marcus Brinkmann wrote: > We do not interpret licenses in favor of the copyright holder. There > is sufficient precendence to this (biggest example being KDE) That's an extremely poor example, and not precedential in the least. KDE wasn't in a position to either amend the license of much of their software to contain a linking exception for Qt, or interpret the GPL in a way that would permit it, because they *weren't the copyright holders for much of the GPL'ed code they used* (see kghostview, kimp, klyx, etc.). If KDE had written all of their GPL'ed code from scratch, it would probably still have been a good idea to try and get them to write an explicit Qt-linking exception (much as apt did), but KDE's licensing problems wouldn't have been nearly the brick wall that they were in reality. The copyright holder's interpretation of the license he uses *is* significant. -- G. Branden Robinson | Human beings rarely imagine a god Debian GNU/Linux | that behaves any better than a branden@debian.org | spoiled child. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Robert Heinlein
Attachment:
pgpCGrcAcAWMq.pgp
Description: PGP signature