Chris Lawrence wrote: > 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.
Oh, this is an old point. I thought for a moment we were breaking new ground. . . . > (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. I think so too. So why not just exclude kgv and kfloppy and distribute the rest? > 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...).] Ciao, Andreas
