Re: When will KDE and Debian get together?
> You and others have brought up the possibility of KDE changing their
> license. I cannot speak for KDE, but I suspect they are reluctant to
> change from the GPL. Furthermore, even if every current and historical
> KDE developer were willing to modify the license of their work, you
> have to acknowledge it would be a logistical nightmare to organize
> such a change since so many have contributed to that project. So my
> judgement is this is a practical impossibility. (A similar practical
> impossibility is one of the protections against changing the kernel
> source from GPL.)
Does this logic apply to adding a clause saying that the programs are:
legal to be distributed, modified and redistributed? If so, why?
I can see that this solution would be difficult to implement for GPLed
programs which were written long before KDE, but I can't imagine why this
would be a problem for programs which were explicitly written for KDE.
> You and others have also brought up the incompatible license
> argument. The official Debian argument on this issue is presented at
> http://www.debian.org/News/1998/19981008. However, if you analyze the
> argument *as put forth there* it seems to me to be in a grey area
> when dealing with a GPLed binary package like KDE which only depends
> in a dynamic way on the Qt shared library. In this situation, all
> the headers, etc., are distributed with Qt so the binary KDE has
> absolutely nothing in it that belongs to Qt.
In saying this you ignore obvious details. For instance, the headers
are an essential part of compiling the binaries. And Troll has asserted
rather strongly (in the context of the Harmony project) that those
headers are copyrighted material, and are subject to Troll's copyright.
[Troll indicated that binaries built from Harmony source code, but using
Troll headers would be illegal.]
> I can see why neither Debian nor KDE wants to change here, and it is
> also a practical impossibility for KDE. Unfortunately, that leads to
> the conclusion that Debian will never distribute the binary versions
> of either KDE-1 or KDE-2 except in the unlikely event that RMS changes
> his mind. This leads to your next point which I absolutely agree with.
I hope you're not advocating that Debian break the law to ease KDE's
discomfort.
> I believe Debian source distribution of KDE is a way out of this mess.
> Source distribution does have the downside that the user must compile
> on their own machine, but modern PC's are getting so powerful that it
> only takes a minute or so to compile most packages.
Unfortunately, distributing source to build binaries is legally equivalent
to building those binaries. If it were possible to build unencumbered
binaries, and if the default configuration for the source distribution
built those unencumbered binaries then we could do this.
But, unfortunately, that option went out the window when Troll convinved
the Harmony project to disband.
> I have hope on this issue because with the exception of one
> correspondent who made it clear that he was completely prejudiced
> against KDE in any form, the others seemed as reasonable as you on the
> issue of distributing KDE as source.
I wouldn't characterise the debian position in this fashion. Then again,
from your comments above, I disagree with you about what the fundamental
issues are.
--
Raul
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