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List:       kde-licensing
Subject:    Re: RMS,Debian and KDE
From:       Steve Hutton <shutton () mediaone ! net>
Date:       2000-06-20 1:06:43
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On Mon, 19 Jun 2000, Joseph Carter wrote:

> The other aspect is that there is a lot of 3rd party GPL'ed code in KDE.
> The obvious examples such as kmidi and kghostscript are there, but there
> are also things like kfloppy and other programs which include code not
> written for KDE, but used anyway.  I had a list some two years ago, but
> even if I could find it it'd be sadly out of date this much later.
> Because of this, without a real serious code audit, we really don't know
> what has implicit permission and doesn't.

Ah, so if someone did a code audit and identified the packages that contain
such code, and then simply *excluded* those packages from being in Debian,
Debian would be able to ship the majority of KDE under terms which even 
RMS would consider legal.

Of course, it takes someone who believes in RMS's legal interpretation 
and who wants to see KDE in Debian to make this happen.  If such a person
existed (and I have my doubts), that person would logically start by including
kdelibs (which has no licensing contentions), then auditing and
including/excluding GPL'd packages in kdebase, etc.

If no such person exists, and TrollTech won't change the QPL the way you
would like, and all the KDE developers can't agree to change the license
for their individual bits of code, and Debian's legal interpretation doesn't
change, there will be no KDE in Debian.  Hmmm...so what's the big deal again?

Steve

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