Re: apache non-free?
I am answering Brandens and Craigs reply, as they are almost identical.
However, they both missed the point I was trying to make (not their fault, I
was not specific enough about it in the first place).
On Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 04:25:35PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> 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 That's an extremely poor example, and not precedential in the least.
Sure it is, if I had been careful enough to be precise about what I meant.
We did ask several times, and indeed requested from KDE, to put add an
exception to the GPL which allows linking to Qt (old licenses). They
refused to add it because they interpreted the license they put on KDE to
allow linking with Qt anyway. We did not agree with the interpretation.
The problematic with third party code did also exist, but did only effect
some individual components of KDE. Credit where credit is due, most of the
KDE code was written from scratch, no doubt about it.
Although it was indeed a real problem, it did not apply to much of the KDE
source code, like kde libs 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.
KDE wrote most of the code of KDE from scratch. We did not add it to Debian
because it linked to Qt, although they said that they believed the GPL
allowed that. If you don't remember that part of the discussion, look out
for any long thread between Raul Miller, me and some KDE guys on kde-legal
or on the Debian lists.
On Sat, Dec 08, 2001 at 10:42:38AM +1100, Craig Sanders wrote:
> a big part of the issue with KDE was not really the license of KDE
> itself, but the license of pre-existing GPL-ed works which had been
> linked with Qt (which had a GPL-incompatible license at the time).
>
> we could have legally distributed the source, or even a binary linked to
> a GPL alternative to Qt (such as the incomplete & now defunct Harmony
> project), but we could not legally distribute binaries linked to Qt.
As I said above, we did not distribute the code that was purely written by
KDE, although they said in public that their interpretation of the GPL is
that it is okay to link it with Qt.
This did upset a lot of people, and I still remember it vividly. I think we
were doing right about keeping a firm position, and not let allow
inofficial interpretation, as suggestive as it is, to influence our decision
to include something in "main" or not.
> there was also the fact that when KDE licensing problems were pointed
> out to KDE authors, they flat-out refused to add an additional
> permission to their license which would allow us/anyone to link their
> GPL software to the GPL-incompatible Qt.
>
> we asked for permission, they said "No"...how else do you interpret a
> refusal to grant permission other than as a refusal to grant permission?
This is an oversimplification, and leaves out the fact that they repeatedly
said that they believe that such an extra permission is simply not
necessary.
Taking everything into account, we refused to include for example kdelibs,
although it was code written by the KDE people only and they interpreted
their license as "ok, this can be linked with qt".
Thanks,
Marcus
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
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