Motif now Open source (fwd)
This seems appropriate to the KDE in Debain question,
and the OpenMotif license thing is bound to come up...
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 16 May 2000 15:21:26 -0600 (MDT)
From: Anthony Fok <foka@ualberta.ca>
Reply-To: elug@elug.edmonton.ab.ca
To: elug@elug.edmonton.ab.ca
Subject: Re: Motif now Open source
On Tue, 16 May 2000, Bruce Sass wrote:
> On Tue, 16 May 2000, Iain O'Cain wrote:
>
> Section 2 of http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif/license/ begins by
> stating that the terms of the license only apply when OpenMotif is used
> with "Open Source" (their definition, from sec.1) operating systems...
>
> > This certainly seems to me to be in the spirit of many other Open Source
> > licenses.
>
> Ya. I'm not sure how this is different than the GPL not wanting to get
> itself bundled with what it considers "non-free" (isn't that the reason
> KDE is not in Debian?).
No and No.
It is close to the spirit of a Open Source license, but not quite there.
8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product.
The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program's
being part of a particular software distribution. If the program is
extracted from that distribution and used or distributed within the
terms of the program's license, all parties to whom the program is
redistributed should have the same rights as those that are granted in
conjunction with the original software distribution.
A similar case is the program "remind" or "reminder". I think it is
licensed under the GNU GPL with the exception that it CANNOT be compiled
or used on any Microsoft operating systems. With this exception clause,
"reminder" is no longer "free" by the "Debian Free Software Guidelines"
nor "Open-Source" by the Open Source Definition. You may find "reminder"
packaged for Debian, in the "non-free" section, and I suppose Open Motif
would go in there too.
In the case of KDE and Debian: It is not a problem of bundling; it is a
problem of compiling and linking software with incompatible licenses that
it would become illegal to distribute KDE v1.x that was linked with qt1.x.
I know most other distributions went ahead and packaged KDE v1.x anyway,
but the consensus by Debian developers was to play it safe---we could be
sued by one or two authors who wrote a GPL'ed software that got included
in KDE without their knowledge, and then sue everyone for violating the
GPL by linking to qt, yada yada yada.
Besides, Debian must uphold the principles of Free Software. :-)
The new QPL in qt2.x solves a large part of the problem. Nonetheless, it
is still incompatible with GPL, and requires the authors of the original
non-KDEized GPL software to add a clause to allow the GPL source to be
linked with qt2.x. Some people have already done that, but it is far from
complete. Last time I checked the discussion, it seems that some KDE
people didn't consider it a problem at all (now that's a problem), and was
somewhat lazy and often neglected to contact the upstream authors of such
GPL software to add such a clause. There was also some complaints as to
why QPL wasn't made GPL-compatible, as it would have saved all these
hassles.
Anyway, Debian do plan to package KDE2 when it is released, provided the
originally GPL code that was included in KDE2 that are linked with
qt2.x all have the "Yes, you may link my GPL code with qt2.x" included.
It's only a matter of time and getting everyone to cooperate. It will
happen eventually.
Anthony
--
Anthony Fok Tung-Ling Civil and Environmental Engineering
foka@ualberta.ca, foka@debian.org University of Alberta, Canada
anthony_fok@catholic.org Keep smiling! *^_^*
Come visit Our Lady of Victory Camp -- http://www.olvc.ab.ca/
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