On Sat, Oct 10, 1998 at 05:14:19AM +0200, Martin Konold wrote: > > On 10 Oct 1998, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote: > > > > All this is just splitting hairs, though. The real question is "what > > > is KDE's problem with just adding that additional permission to their > > > license"? How does it hurt them to do that? > > > > Is that really not obvious to you? > > Craig Sanders and some debian people wanted to play simple tricks ;-)
No tricks, we see what we believe to be serious issues. We'd like those issues resolved. More than a few of us have nothing against KDE (I won't say none of us do because that would be a lie) but we still recognize the need to deal with what to us seems like a messy issue. The only way Debian could deal with it is by removing KDE from Debian. A few are not sad to see it go, a few are, and a good number figure that it doesn't matter since Debian packages are available elsewhere. I think it's too bad it had to be removed personally. I'd like to see it returned to the contrib section for now, and I'd even more like to see it in main. Contrib won't happen till the license problem is hashed out, even those who didn't want to see KDE go agreed that it had to because of those issues. Main won't happen as long as KDE depends on non-free software (Qt). KDE has said they wouldn't use a Qt replacement if it were given to them, already functional. We take this to mean KDE has no intention to remove the dependancy on Qt which is clearly non-free according the the DFSG. That KDE has known about the license problem for some time and does nothing had to finally be taken as KDE has no desire to try and fix the problem and in fact refuses to admit the problem is there because of what it would mean to them. It's really a shame KDE chose the GPL. Many BSD people will tell you the GPL is the most restrictive free software license there is. It's the only widely used free license that prohibits use with a library like Qt under any circumstances at all. No special exception for system libraries, but rather the code is free and use it how you want.
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