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Re: Debian KDE philosophy



On Fri, Oct 09, 1998 at 02:55:20PM +0100, Gernot Bauer wrote:
> As I read in some postings (slashdot.org and several other mailing
> lists) debian is planning not to distribute KDE (and qt) anymore. 

Please read the original announcment as posted on the debian-announce
mailing list and the website (http://www.debian.org/News/1998/19981008).
There are no plans to stop making Qt available via the Debian FTP sites.

> Could anyone tell me the reason why kde should not be distributed via the
> non-free-tree (ftp)... Netscape is available as well (and this is software
> what I call NONFREE in terms of GPL).

The announcment explains why distributing KDE binaries by anyone except the
KDE copyright holders is a violation of KDE's license.

> What about a kde-installer.deb-package?

We expect the KDE project to continue to distribute KDE in .deb format from
their FTP servers, so an installer package is not necessary.

> What annoyes (sp?) me is that people say "Linux needs a nice workspace" -
> and for me, kde is one - and then say, "well, kde is nice, but not free
> and therefore we dont want to distribute it". I dont want to start a
> flamewar here, maybe somebody could explain technical or legal-reasons to
> me.

Read the original announcement. This isn't about Debian not wanting to
distribute KDE, this is about Debian not being allowed to distribute KDE
binaries.

Ray
-- 
ART  A friend of mine in Tulsa, Okla., when I was about eleven years old. 
I'd be interested to hear from him. There are so many pseudos around taking 
his name in vain. 
- The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan 


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