Re: I thought KDE wasn't included because of QT?!?

[Brian Servis <servis@purdue.edu>]

*- On 23 Dec, Bart Szyszka wrote about "Re: I thought KDE wasn't included because of QT?!?"
>> QT v1 is included in the non-free section.  The problem is that KDE is
>> supposed to be under the GPL but is violating the GPL by linking to QT
>> which is non-free.  So Debian and others decided not to include KDE
>> until they either fixed the licensing issues or QT became free.  QT v2
>> is under less restrictive license and thus once KDE is built with the
>> new QT then it will go in main.  This is all just my rough
>> interpetation. 
> 
> See this I don't understand. If they're not including KDE because it has a
> non-free program as a dependency, then what about Licq? In the stable
> tree, it depends on qt1g:
> http://www.debian.org/Packages/stable/net/licq.html
> http://www.debian.org/Packages/stable/libs/qt1g.html
> 

Licq is in the contrib tree since itself is free but depends on a
non-free package.  The licq authors have written an exception into their
license for use with Qt. This type of exception is allowed under the
GPL.  The KDE folks had/have no exception and thus were/are violating
the GPL. This is one of the solutions that was mentioned in the Debian
page in regards to the KDE issues.

Brian Servis
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