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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: The Licencing Issue
From:       Waldo Bastian <bastian () kde ! org>
Date:       2000-06-13 6:17:31
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On Mon, 12 Jun 2000, Talin wrote:
> Here are some things that I hear often from KDE developers on this
> issue:
>
> 1. "We don't need to change the license, therefore we won't change it."
> 2. "Those Debian people are being unreasonable - they are fanatics and
> their interpretation of the legal issues are wrong."
> 3. "Those Debian people are in a conspiracy to keep KDE out of their
> distribution."

I would like to make some remarks about these issues.

1) Changing licenses is not something that can be done easily. KDE has been 
under a lot of fire for its disinterest in licensing issues, given that it is 
probably not a good idea to hastily change some licenses.

2&3) After having read quite some postings on this issue in the various 
groups dedicated to this I must conclude that there are very few people (on 
both sides) who seem to understand a) the full text of the GPL b) copright 
law c) both. I think it is a big problem that so little people (developers!) 
actually understand all the implications of the GPL. That is worrying because 
it are these same developers which license their work to others based on the 
GPL. It is my believe that the founders of KDE would not have chosen the GPL 
if they had truly been aware of all aspects of the GPL. Wrt to legal issues 
surrounding the GPL you can probably build flamefests a big as vi vs. emacs 
but I don't think that's of any use. More interesting is probably the 
question whether KDE is following the intentions of the GPL. In the case of 
KDE 1.x my answer would be probably not. In the case of KDE 2.x my answer 
would be mostly yes.

Thanks to the great folks at TrollTech KDE 2.x can build on an excellent open 
source toolkit. I am well aware of the subtle differences between "open 
source" and "free software" but I would assume that such a breakthrough would 
be welcomed as very big step in the right direction. Instead I have seen a 
lot of bitching and moaning from a lot of Debian people, often either 
completely misinformed or based on preliminary drafts of the QPL. Then, after 
some time, people at Debian seem suddenly more interested in the legal 
fineprint of the GPL than its intentions and start to scream libelous and 
baseless accusations towards the KDE team. "illegal", "criminal", etc. etc.

Such actions make it hard to have any trust in the Debian organisation and to 
believe it is actually interested in the interests of KDE and its users. As 
for KDE being included in Debian, to be honest, I can't care less.

That said, I do care about KDE, its users and its developers and I would like 
to see KDE being accepted as both open source as well as free software. It's 
not fair for people honestly spending a lot of their spare time in making 
software available for everyone to be flamed to death over and over again by 
people who happen to disagree with the fineprint of a license. It's the 
responsibility of the KDE project as a whole to bring an end to that and to 
find a solution that is acceptable to all. 

I don't think that adding a clause to the GPL that explicitly allows linking 
with Qt is a very good solution because that basically just moves to a new 
generations of problems where people end up mixing GPL-with and GPL-without 
code which is bound to result in the same flamefests we already have seen too 
often. There are already enough different licenses out there and the GPL is 
already complicated enough lets not try to worsten that situation.

Cheers,
Waldo
-- 
Make way, KDE/Linux is coming to a desktop near you!
 
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