Hi, > On Sun, 28 May 2000, Joey Hess wrote: > > KDE, in source form or not, cannot be an official part of Debian until > > its license problems are resolved. Source is great, but you have to be > > ale to leagally build it, link it against the required libraires, use it, > > and distriute binaries to others, or it is not free enough to be part > > of the Debian distribution.
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. 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 to do anything they want with it so long as they do not publish the results.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 personal use I see fit so long as I do not publish the results. 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. > > Thus, I don't think there is the slightest license issue at stake here over > the issue of distributing the GPLed KDE source. Fundamentally, you cannot > use the GPL to justify supressing the distribution of GPLed source code. You > indeed may want to supress KDE source distribution via Debian for emotional > reasons, but I hope for Debian's sake that you rethink this. The fact is KDE > is doing fine without Debian, but will Debian's future be fine without some > sort of interaction with the large and growing pool of KDE talent? In my > view, participating in the distribution of debianized KDE source code is an > excellent way for Debian to interact with the KDE community without > violating any licenses, and I hope that Debian takes advantage of this > opportunity. Note that Joey Hess said that you not only want the source, built it, link it against the required libraries and us it. But you also want want to be free to distribute any derived binaries with your friends! Your solution (distribute autobuilding source) ignores that there is a real license problem. You might be right that your solution could probably avoid the legal problems on technical grounds, since it could be argued that it doesn't violate the letter of the GPL. But the solution does violate the spirit of the GPL. Even if your solution would be legally sound users still don't have all the freedoms that the GPL promotes. The question is if Debian wants to promote violating the spirit of the GPL by finding a sneaky way to obey the letter of the GPL. Other distributions might not have such high ethical standpoints on user freedom and the spirit of the GPL. But I think that Debian doesn't want to promote a way to avoid the spirit of the GPL by implementing a complicated way of getting the final binary in the hands of the user who then doesn't have the legal right to share that binary or any other derived binaries. (And it might be that your whole solution might be seen by a judge as violating the spitit of the GPL since you are in fact distributing derived works although you claim to be only distributing source. Although could of courese only happen if someone, whose GPLed coda/source is linked/distributed together with KDE binaries/source, really wants to go to court about it.) Cheers, Mark
