From kde-licensing Thu Apr 16 06:52:31 1998 From: Richard Stallman Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1998 06:52:31 +0000 To: kde-licensing Subject: Re: [freeqt] Re: FreeQt concerns X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-licensing&m=89270970920147 KDE may have all sorts of nice technical qualities, but as long as it depends on Qt and Qt remains non-free, its technical qualities make no difference. If we cannot use a program because of its distribution terms, its technical characteristics don't make a difference. It's clear from what you wrote that you don't share my concern about freedom. Given that, it is not surprising that you see no problem with using Qt. Your view is nothing unusual; most computer users don't care about freedom, and as a result most of them are content to use Microsoft software. Those of us who care about freedom are in a minority, but we will continue to advance the state of free operating systems; without your help, this will go slower, but we will still get there. But you overlook that KDE is also existing thanks to Qt. I don't believe that: I am sure you could have developed KDE in some other way if you had made the effort. You could have developed a free toolkit that did what you needed. It might have been somewhat more work, but the result would have been infinitely more useful to the free software community. I mean "infinitely" literally. If you had developed KDE using a free toolkit, its usefulness would have been greater than zero. Right now, the usefulness of KDE to free operating systems is zero, and statements that Qt is free, or just as good as free, do harm. btw: There was a mail some days ago which claimed to come from "Richard Stallman", too. In this mail the author claimed that writing non-GPLed software is "unethical" and that it was good if people who do so run into trouble. The message you are talking about was from me, but that is not quite what it said. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html has a description of my views on the matter, for whoever may be interested. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html for the definition of free software and how that relates to GPL-covered software.