On Mon, May 29, 2000 at 09:55:38AM -0700, Alan W. Irwin wrote: > I am glad we agree that source is great. But the rest of your sentences > that I have just quoted are the nub of our disagreement. I believe the GPL > says nothing about the *private* use of software.
Debian isn't exactly private. > An individual is allowed to do anything they want with it so long > as they do not publish the results. This is the essence of the > intellectual freedom that attracts so many to the GPL. So once the > source is distributed to me, I as an individual can legally build it, > link against any libraries I like, and employ it for any personal > use I see fit so long as I do not publish the results. We're not stopping you. Why do you want *us* to publish? > To add some credibility to your argument you have thrown in > "distribute binaries to others". Of course, if such distribution > occurred a whole set of GPL rules kicks in, but I think this is a > non-issue since few if any Debian users will actually do this once > they have built KDE on their own system. The binaries of a GPLed work help define what the GPLed work is. People can already download the sources to KDE. -- Raul
