From kde-licensing Wed Aug 16 13:31:03 2000 From: Steve Hutton Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 13:31:03 +0000 To: kde-licensing Subject: Re: QT Designer _NOT_ under QPL. X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-licensing&m=96643373919145 On Wed, 16 Aug 2000, Joseph Carter wrote: > On Tue, Aug 15, 2000 at 07:37:54PM -0400, Steve Hutton wrote: > > > http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/license-list.html > > > > > > Since the QPL is incompatible with the GNU GPL, you cannot take a > > > GPL-covered program and Qt and link them together, no matter how. > > > > Simply repeating this over and over won't make it true. It's > > _one_opinion_, and the law give no extra weight to the author > > of a license when it comes time to interpret the license. There's > > no room for "what I really meant when I wrote that was..." > > This is the FSF's opinion. It's also Debian's opinion. And it's Red > Hat's opinion as well. (though they'll give you an excuse about "market > forces" making them ignore these issues until they are resolved one way or > the other.. which of course will never happen...) > > > It's funny to read someone argue that there is no room for "what I really > meant was..." given that is precisely what you expect Debian to accept in > the case of GPL and QPL compatibility. We don't think they are. And if > it's not enough to say "but we meant..." then it's not. And regardless of > the legal standings of whether or not that will hold, Debian always has > and still does require each item of the DFSG to be explicitly met for > inclusion into main. We also apply the same standard of explicit > compatibility in cases where licenses are mixed. If the licenses aren't > compatible at face value, they do not meet our requirements. This is fine, it is just misleading to say it is legally motivated. I could make a distribution tomorrow with a policy of not shipping any apps that don't say "I like pudding" in front of their licenses. I wouldn't, however, demand that authors add that phrase so I can actually ship something. Make your bed, but lie in it. > KDE will never be in Debian. I don't have to see to that. KDE's biggest > proponents will do it and blame us for it. Why the hell do you think I > refuse to do anything more for KDE? I'm tired of being blamed by KDE and > Debian alike for not resolving the problem. And being in the Debian camp, > I happen to agree with Debian. We are under NO OBLIGATION to package KDE. > And KDE developers and supporters want to make it as hard as possible for > us to do so, demanding that we change our policies for them. Who is doing the demanding? KDE seems to not care what Debian does, remember? > > "You may re-use this code as long as you make all my original > > sources availble when you do so, and you must make the sources > > to your additions available, AND, you must insure that anyone who > > further derives from your derviation will not suffer through the horrible > > inconvenience of having to distribute any portion of that work > > through a PATCH(!)" > > > > Is that what Free software is about these days? > > It's what the GPL is about. Read it sometime. The GPL demands that you > never have to jump through any other hoops than the ones it outlines. > Sometimes that's a real PITA (Richard and I have "discussed" (for some > versions of "discuss", I think the discussions usually ended with him > being rather annoyed..) why this is sometimes not a good thing) but at > least as often as it's been annoying it's been helpful. Oh, so the GPL is about not "jumping through hoops?" All this time I thought it was about Freedom, silly me. RMS must be quite the marketeer... Steve