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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: A proposal to deal with the current RedHat situation
From:       Rob Kaper <cap () capsi ! com>
Date:       2002-09-02 16:37:03
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On Monday 02 September 2002 18:16, Shawn Gordon wrote:
> they are some scripts that we made to automate the process, no we are not
> giving the scripts away, but that is hardly relevant to building the
> software, it's not sticking something into the binaries or anything.  we
> might productize the process, or we might decide to give it away at some
> point, we haven't made a decision on it yet, so we are just keeping it to
> ourselves for the moment.

I'd be against the use of proprietary tools to develop and distribute KDE. 
We'd be in the same position from the pre-GPL Qt days: people will bitch and 
if you would decide to stop offering the service or refuse to accept 
fixes/patches we need or specs for specific distributions (what if you team 
up with one of them?) we would be screwed.

If Jane goes down ;-) we would also not be able to create and release binaries 
as we please, unless we have control over the server. Hosting it on a server 
controlled by KDE would make more sense to me.

Sure, it won't affect the sources. But if users start to rely on the service 
and we have to shut it down because of any proprietary components we'd create 
a lot of bad karma. Whatever tools we use should be completely open, or else 
we could end up in a situation worse than the current one.

I am against providing binaries anyway. Distributions will probably still make 
their own binaries, so we'd end up facing even more different binaries in the 
bug system, unless we stop supporting any distribution-made binaries 
alltogether and redirect all of those users to their vendor.

Providing binaries would remove the symptoms of one uncooperative vendor, but 
it wouldn't solve the problem at hand: people can package KDE however they 
please as long as the licenses are respected.

Rob
-- 
Rob Kaper     | Gimme some love, gimme some skin,
cap@capsi.com | if we ain't got that then we ain't got much
www.capsi.com | and we ain't got nothing, nothing! -- "Nothing" by A

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