Re: Recently released QPL
On Thu, Mar 25, 1999 at 12:55:12PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> I'm sorry, but your understanding is severely lacking or else you do
> not agree with the free software premise that Debian is based upon, in
> which case I would have to question why you are a Debian developer at
> all.
>
> The GPL does not restrict my rights. It protects my rights, and the
> rights of everyone else, by preventing people from being able to steal
> the code and release it in binary-only form. This is an excellent
> thing, and highlights one serious flaw in the BSD license, for
> instance.
That is your opinion (and the opinion of most of us) but it's still not the
"fact" you make it out to be. GPL *does* restrict your rights. If you
found a kewl foobar program but wanted to put the xforms front end to it,
you can't. Well, you can, but then you can't distribute it to anyone,
anywhere. Your right to use the xforms library is restricted. That's part
of the mess with KDE. Many people objected to KDE because the chose a
non-free library to work with but what got it pulled was the linking of
those GPL'd programs to this non-free library even though THEIR source was
or would have been free.
Sure, the GPL restricts somebody's freedom to use any part of that code in
their proprietary software and that's what you want... And you accept the
loss of freedom to chose any library as an acceptable trade, but it's still
a restriction on you.
X's license is more free but has the undesirable affect of allowing it to
let people use Free code, improve free code and not be forced to return it
to the community...
--
Please cc all mailing list replies to me, also.
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