Re: [Fwd: Corel : GNOME vs KDE]
First of all, don't post your message twice.
On Fri, Apr 23, 1999 at 01:59:51 -0500, John Foster wrote:
> Wake up and smell the money! The KDE folks have the right to SELL or
> Liscense their desktop for commercial purposes if they want to.
At the moment, KDE is GPLed. Of course they have the right to sell it (as do
you), and of course it may be used for commercial purposes.
Ever read Richard M. Stallman, "Selling Free Software (can be OK)",
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html ?
KDE is free software. There are two reasons why KDE isn't in Debian.
- It depends on a non-free library, Qt.
This problem will be solved when Qt 2.0 will be released under the
QPL 1.0 (http://www.troll.no/qpl/), which is a DFSG-free license.
- There is a conflict between KDE's licensing (plain GPL) and
that of Qt which prevents Debian from distributing
KDE in binary form. Unfortunately, this does not change with Qt 2.0.
There are however strong indications KDE will be changing its license from
GPL to a different DFSG-free license to remove this incompatibility.
Once Qt 2.0 is released (QPL-licensed snapshots are already available via
anonymous FTP), Qt can go into "main".
Once KDE's license is changed to remove the incompatibility with the QT
license, it can go into "contrib" (if Qt 2.0 isn't available by then) or
"main" (when Qt 2.0 is available).
Now let's quit this KDE/Qt bashing before debian-user gets Slashdot-like
signal to noise ratios.
Ray
--
J.H.M. Dassen | RUMOUR Believe all you hear. Your world may
jdassen@wi.LeidenUniv.nl | not be a better one than the one the blocks
| live in but it'll be a sight more vivid.
| - The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan
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