Re: QPL quick check
On Mon, Feb 14, 2000 at 04:29:21PM +0100, Henning Makholm wrote:
> Scripsit Raul Miller <moth@debian.org>
>
> > I'd put it this way: you need to put a statement in the copyright file
> > that shows that we have proper permission. Something like this, maybe:
>
> > In addition to the permissions granted in the GPL, it's legal to
> > distribute working copies of this program which have been linked
> > against Qt.
>
> That is not good; it means that the distributor does not have to
> abide by the rest of the GPL's restriction, as long as the copies
> distributed have been linked against Qt.
I was worrying about this after I sent it and, yeah, I think you're
right. Problems that occurred to me:
(1) No license is specified.
(2) No author is specified.
(3) There's no functional description for Qt.
(4) There's no guarantee that this result can be modified and redistributed.
This last point, (4), is a non-issue as long as we accept that Qt and
the KDE code are completely independent code bases. And if we break
that assumption then we wind up with some even worse gotchas where the
QPL license requires that all modifications can be relicensed by Troll.
Which means, if the GPL definition of "modification" is applied to
the KDE program that Troll has a legal right to distribute the GPLed
code under whatever terms they like. [Not that I personally care --
it would be bad PR for them, so they probably wouldn't do that unless
they got bought out by somebody such as Apple.]
> Don't we have a canonical exception statement somewhere in the list
> archives?
Probably. I'm not sure we looked at it for flaws, however.
--
Raul
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