On Jan 29, Andreas Pour wrote: > > (3) real permission to distribute from the authors. > > I do not quite know what you mean by this, but if you mean that to > conform to your practice noted above of confirming from package > authors that packages can be distributed by Debian, I will see if I > can get the core KDE developers to send you their approval that you > distribute KDE code. Mail me privately please if you think it is > worth any effort and I will get started on it.
It's a bit more complicated than that with some of the KDE software, because the GPL does not technically permit the linking of software against libraries that have licenses more restrictive than the GPL (like the QPL, which has restrictions on for-profit use on Win32). If all of the code in a particular KDE app is written by KDE members, all we need is something like: KFlarg is (C) 1999 Foo and Bar. You may use and distribute KFlarg under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 (or a later version, at your discretion). As a special exception, you may also link KFlarg against the Qt widget library. (I forget the exact phrasing we decided was appropriate; but, some stuff that uses XForms in contrib uses it. I do know the "correct version" is longer). However, there are several instances of software in KDE being repackagings of existing software, with some work to integrate it into KDE (I am told KGV fits into this category). In these cases, because not all of the work was done by the KDE group, we also need permission from the author of the original software (GV in this case) to link against the GPL-incompatible software. [Personally, I think if you wrote the software yourself and link it against Qt, it's pretty obvious from a legal standpoint that you accept people linking it against Qt. However, if you take someone else's software and do the same thing, I can't see how we (or anyone else) can interpret that as "acceptable". A lot of people have made a possibly erroneous assumption that authors like that of GV won't consider linking against Qt an abuse, and there are plenty of fat targets out there for a lawsuit (Corel, Red Hat, Caldera...).] Chris -- ============================================================================= | Chris Lawrence | Your source for almost nothing of value: | | <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | http://www.lordsutch.com/ | | | | | Open Directory Editor | Are you tired of politics as usual? | | http://dmoz.org/ | http://www.lp.org/ | =============================================================================