From kde-licensing Fri Feb 18 08:35:27 2000 From: Don Sanders Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2000 08:35:27 +0000 To: kde-licensing Subject: Re: Heart of the debate X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-licensing&m=95086485626638 Ok I have said some things that weren't true. This was not my intent I was just trying really hard to understand the license, maybe too hard. > Consider section 1. It says "you may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the > Program's source code provided that you ...". I interpret this as saying "you > may copy (in part or whole) the Program's source code and distribute verbatim > copies of the Program's source code provided that you ...". Absolutely no one agrees with me, this interpretation is wrong, and that is not what section 1 says. (Though part of me still believes it, the evidence against me overwhelming). > > Same problem with the first > > paragraph of 3, as you noted. > > There is no problem for section 3. Again no one agrees with me, and I can only conclude my explanation is wrong. > (Even if you GPL the binary, a binary is an "other work" and > the preferred method of making modifications to it is a hex editor so the > "source code" to a binary is the binary) I'm not sure this is true, maybe the source code to a binary is the source code to the program used to create the binary. > I believe that the GPL does not use mutatis mutandis. After a long discussion > the lawyers I have consulted agree. At the time I said this I had just been told that I could apply the GPL to my KDE application. I thought this meant the lawyers agreed with everything I said, but now I think about this I'm probably wrong. I don't know whether the lawyers agreed with me on the above point or not. (I suspect they didn't) I've been told that in order to GPL a KDE app I need to consider it an "other work" rather than a program. I'm going to have to go back and talk about this more, they seemed to have a very strict definition of a program (for something to be a program it had to include all the source code it needed to compile and run). I'm going to have to go back and ask them exactly why they said this. Anyway I'm fallible I make mistakes, I'm sorry. BFN, Don.