Thibaut Cousin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I found something that may help to understand the problem between >Debian and KDE in the archives of KDE's mailing lists. Strangely they >don't see the problem in the same way.
Amazing ;) >If this mailing list is not the proper place for posting that, where do >I post it ? It's not. debian-legal would be a much better choice; I've set the Reply-To: header accordingly. > Here it is : > >> As far as I cant tell this isn't a legal issue. If QT is distributed >> as part of a (Linux) distribution then the GPL grants an exception to >> allow redistribution of GPLed code linked with QT. (See the special >> exception part of clause 3 of the GPL). So it can be legal to >> redistribute GPLed apps linked to QT even if the QPL is incompatible >> with the GPL. An old argument, and that's a *very* liberal reading of the GPL (and not the FSF's reading, incidentally, and they wrote the thing). The distribution of Qt would have to be distributed with a "major component" of the operating system, and Qt is not anything like a major component of Debian; that clause is there to allow GNU systems to be legally built on systems with proprietary C libraries and such, which was the situation before things like the Linux (and later GNU) C Library were written. If it were permitted to read this clause in this way, then I could take a GPLed program, write a proprietary extension to it for which I kept the source code to myself, call the proprietary extension a "major component" of my operating system, and thus defeat the GPL. This is obviously not the intent of the license. -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
