On Wed, 07 Oct 1998, Dan Jacobowitz wrote: >On Mon, Oct 05, 1998 at 05:27:23PM +0200, Moritz Moeller-Herrmann wrote: >> I study law. And I can tell you that thereīs not a problem with the GPL >> licence in the KDE project. Even if the GPL (read very narrowly and >> literally) >> prohibited the use of QT, every judge/lawyer would reinterpret this licence >> to >> allow the use of QT , if the author of kpackage used it to distribute his >> program. What I am trying to say is, a licence can be interpreted in many >> ways >> and one very important issue in the interpretation of any legal document is >> the >> intent of the author or the user of this document. As the author of kpackage >> didnīt want to ban anyone from using qt, his licences (the GPL) must be read >> to >> allow the use qt. No problem so far. >> Problems could only arise if another copyright holderīs rights were violated, >> for example if a second GPLd program were merged into kpackage, and the >> author >> of this program read the GPL in a much more strict way than the author(s) of >> kpackage. Then weīd have two licences (both of identical wording: GPL), which >> could be interpreted differently, because the people who use the licence have >> opposing intentions with their licence. Since you distribute a binary DEB >> file, >> the problem canīt come up. >> Hope to clarify the issue a bit! > > >I have one question to that - in what way does distributing a >binary suddenly resolve a licence conflict? According to the GPL, >GPL'd code can not be linked to QT; _only_ the author of a given piece >of code has the right to make an exception to that rule. Because the >original in many cases was not written for QT, no such exception is >present.
I believe that what Moritz is saying is that the main KDE packages (kdesupport, kdelibs, kdebase, kdenetwork, and koffice) are all quite legal because the authors expressly wrote them for use with QT. The only issue is the status of other programs that have been K'ised. So we can just distribute the main KDE packages as part of Debian. I've started making Debian packages of the development releases of the base KDE packages. Is there anyone who's got some space on a fast FTP server where I can store them? -- Got no future, got no past. Here today, built to last.
