Re: KDE not in Debian?
On Wed, Feb 02, 2000 at 06:21:07AM -0500, Andreas Pour wrote:
> Well, there certainly is no case law reference that Qt is incompatible
> with GPL, is there? I thought the uncertainly is what bothers Debian.
> Looks like at best we have thick uncertainty here.
The problem isn't uncertainty so much as the problem is the lack of
explicit permission.
Good author relations says "hands off if the author isn't up front and
direct about wanting us to distribute their code". If the author doesn't
give us DFSG code (where we all have legal permission to maintain and
distribute it), then we don't distribute it.
Note that generally we'll refuse to distribute code, even if we have a
legal right to, if the author asks that we not distribute it. In the
long run, this solves a lot of problems. [This is particularly important
for beta software, but it's also relevant for other transition times.]
In the case of KDE, unfortunately, there's too many contradictions
for us to be happy about distributing the code. There are many, many
authors for KDE software, and these authors do not seem to agree on the
distribution conditions they want for their part of the programs.
However, it appears that many KDE authors do want us to distribute their
code, so when these licensing issues get straightened out we should be
able to distribute the code written by those authors.
--
Raul
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