On Mon, Oct 14, 2002 at 03:05:19PM +0200, Henning Makholm wrote: > Debian has simply refrained from distributing some programs which had > code covered by the GPL yet linked to Qt at a time where distributing > such programs would have been illegal. /me wearily makes his plea for reason and sanity yet again s/would have been illegal/could have been infringing of the copyright license on other software distributed by Debian/ Copyright infringement is historically a tort, not a crime. Different copyright holders of GPL-licensed software feel differently about whether "dynamic linking" of their code into a GPL-incompatible work constitutes an infrigment of their copyright. Because the FSF holds the copyright on a great many GPL-licensed works, and because they do feel that such linking constitutes infringment, Debian refrained from distributing many programs that linked to Qt. But we did not exhaustively catalog every case. -- G. Branden Robinson | It's not a matter of alienating Debian GNU/Linux | authors. They have every right to branden@debian.org | license their software however we http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | like. -- Craig Sanders
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