Fwd: Re: Liscencing Issue - Taking Action
Hi,
I think parts of the Debian+KDE discussion on the KDE Maillist will be
interesting for you too.
Konrad
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Subject: Re: Liscencing Issue - Taking Action
Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2000 10:20:14 +0200
From: Konrad Rosenbaum <htw6966@htw-dresden.de>
On Sun, 11 Jun 2000, did mosfet mean:
> forge wrote:
> >
> > Another question.
> > What prevents Debian from including
> > QT, QT-KDE-ADDON, KDESUPPORT and KDELIBS ?
> > Is there now a conflict between the LGPL, QPL, and BSD licenses ?
>
> Their position is not even we kde core developers that write all our own
> original code can link to Qt with an unmodified GPL. That's right - they
> think it ambigious that we allow things like kdelibs, konqueror, kcalc,
> etc... to link to Qt ;-) We wrote the configure to link to Qt, call Qt
> in every GUI part of the application, uploaded it to KDE CVS, etc... yet
> they insist that somehow it may not be allowed by us that you link to
> Qt. Very, very silly stuff.
[please someone forward this to debian]
To clearify some things: Linking to Qt is no violation of the GPL! Qt is a
Library, that means it is intentionally used by the program. As I know common
practice the library does not "modify" the program but vice versa. Otherwise
it wouldn't be allowed to link any GPL program to the LGPL'ed glibc or any
other libc running on any sytem where GNU software is used.
In any law I know about (at least German ones) there exists a concept called
"intention". If a programmer writes a program that only runs while certain
libraries are present it can legally be assumed that it is his intention to
link the program against the library. You don't need written permission, the
facts speak for themselves. AFAIK KDE only runs when Qt is there and linked
against KDE - so you may assume that it is totally ok. It has never been
practice of the FSF or any other big project to see license conflicts just
because you decide to use certain libs - if they do so they have to express
it and to provide alternative libs.
Qt is nothing else than any kind of libc or compiler internal precompiled
functions (so called "built-ins", as new/delete for C++).
After some years of breaking my head on GPL I personally think the only thing
which should be done is to clearify how we intend the word "modification" in
GPL v.3.
Konrad
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