Re: KDE not in Debian?
Jeff Licquia wrote:
> The existence of this debate proves at least a significant plurality.
> Otherwise, you could afford to ignore us, right?
> [...]
> Are you trying to cite numbers as a plausible argument to look down on
> us, or call our opinion irrelevant? Again, that's not exactly the
> best way to "win friends and influence people", especially if you are
> hoping to cooperate with us in the future.
You must be redefining "plurality" and "majority". You were the only who
first used these terms, and they are terms that refer to numbers. A
majority means more than fifty-percent. A plurality means the highest
vote-getter. When you claim that a majority or plurality of the
community feels that KDE is illegal, you are way off base.
> Given this, the BSD license is the "most free", proprietary licenses
> are the "least free", and the GPL occupies a place in the middle. If
> the BSD license can accomodate the opposite extreme side of freeness
> by allowing proprietary licensing, surely it can also accomodate the
> GPL.
The BSDL does accomodate the GPL. There is no questioning that. But it
does not accomodate any attempts to change the author's copyright. This
goes beyond anything that proprietary redistributors have done (with the
exception of Microsoft, which is a scofflaw). I think some confusion
comes about because of the FSF's insistance that closed
source==proprietary. Certainly someone could take my BSD source, compile
it, and distribute it binary only. However, those binaries still have my
license on them and the recipients have the right to redistribute them
themselves. As an example, Solaris includes a lot of BSD utilities. I,
as a user of Solaris, have the right to take the BSD utilities and
redistribute them.
David Johnson
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