Re: KDE not in Debian?
On Thu, Feb 03, 2000 at 12:38:51PM +0100, Marc van Leeuwen wrote:
> I maintain that unless the distribution of dynamically linked binaries
> itself is considered a copyright infringement, there's no vicarious
> liability either. And to come back to the static/dynamic distinction:
> an obvious and relevant difference with distribution of statically
> linked binaries is that the user can execute those without also having
> the library object file.
Ok, let's pretend for a minute that distributing kghostscript is legal.
What does that mean?
Well, for one thing, it should be legal to make trivial changes to the
source and redistribute. For example, adding -static to the CFLAGS in
the makefile and redistributing should be perfectly legal. You've granted
this right under the GPL.
Now, let's say that I take this modified version of the sources for
kghostscript and decide to chop out some of Qt, add in some code in
from the Gimp, and in the process wind up creating a Qt variant where
any display element will renders postscript.
Imagine that, after a couple years of development, the resulting widget
set is extracted out of the program and achieves great popularity.
So Troll decided to exercise their rights, takes a copy of that widget
set, cleans it up, and sells it under their professional license.
Would you agree that each of these steps would be legal as a consequence
of kghostscript being licensed under the GPL? Would you agree that this
would be legal as a consequence of kghostscript being licensed under Qt?
If not, why not?
[By the way, I'm not trying to predict the future here -- feel free to
treat "kghostscript", "Gimp" and "postscript" as metasyntactic variables.]
--
Raul
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