Mark Rafn wrote: > On the gripping hand, if the owner of the copyright for abiword (which may > not be a well-defined entity if significant contributions have been made > by multiple people under GPL) chooses to link against restricted libs, > that's fine and dandy, as permission to do so is granted, by definition, > to oneself. This hybrid can't go in Debian (unless its released under a > different license than GPL), but nobody has broken any laws.
I don't want to start a flame war here... so let's be careful. In your above example, the _hydrid_ would be created and distributed by the owner of the copyright, and it still couldn't go into Debian. Right? It's a little weird to me. If the upstream author links against Qt or XForms and releases under the GPL, doesn't that nullify whatever GPL clause against that? For example, take lyx in instable (I know people disagree with me on this interpretation). It's under the GPL and links against XForms. It doesn't have an exception clause, but rather `remarks' clarifying the license: While LyX has been released nominally under the GPL in the past, it has in fact never been truly GPL. Particularly, it has always been linked to a closed source library. While some have taken a view that such actions violate the GPL, this is a legal impossibility. The law is quite clear that the release of the software by the original authors and copyright holders changed the licenses. Rather than leaving the issue to be debated, the following clarifications are given. This is *not* a change of license, but a clarification of the license that LyX has always used. All patches submitted to LyX fall under this same license. [...] So, Debian might be happy because they have clarified that linking against XForms is okay. But, am I to conclude that Debian doesn't agree with their argument that while they were using the GPL without clarification they were still okay license-wise because they were doing the linking in original work? (i.e. it's not a derived work of some other GPL work). Any original work linked against Qt or XForms that is GPLed cannot be redistributed by Debian, even if the linking was an obvious intent of the copyright owner. Right? This matters to me before of three such packages with an MIA upstream author. I mentioned this problem to the author earlier and he didn't see a problem since he was doing the linking upstream, so it was implied to be okay. Then a discussion on debian-devel ended up by saying it was okay too, so I told the upstream author that is was okay and that ended that. Now the packages are in danger of being removed. Would adding the email from the copyright holder be enough of a clarification? :-( Peter