Subject: Re: KDE not in Debian?
From: Joseph Carter (knghtbrd@debian.org)
Date: Thu Jan 20 2000 - 04:24:23 CET
On Wed, Jan 19, 2000 at 11:39:33AM +0100, Martin Schulze wrote:
> > On the KDE website (kde.org) I saw that KDE was GPL'd. Debian packages are
> > available. But why is KDE not in the official Debian distribution?
>
> The problem exists because KDE *IS* GPL'ed and Qt is not. Both licences
> are not compatible thus we believe they cannot be legally distributed
> at all. The KDE people are changing licences as we have proposed, but
> this takes time.
It seems actually that they are not. Much of KDE is still GPL'd and there
largely seems to be little to no interest among the KDE people to do
anything about it.
Additionally, Troll Tech doesn't seem at all interested in making their
license compatible with the GPL.
Nobody from either group is talking to me (or to anyone else so far as I
know) which generally seems to support my conclusion that they're not
interested.
After all I went through personally to try and help them fix their legal
issues, I'm kinda upset that none of these people are even talking to me
at this point. As a result I suspect we will _NEVER_ see KDE in Debian,
as much as I would like to see that problem resolved.
Maybe the KDE people haven't gotten the message. Some of us use, like,
and believe in the GPL. That they don't care is offensive to us, and as
long as they continue to abuse it, we can't support them. It was
different when there were people from KDE asking for help to fix the
problems---I was happy to help (and still would be), but if they no longer
care I suggest we boycott KDE (and suggest others do the same) until such
time as the KDE people or the Troll Tech people (it technically isn't
their problem, they just happen to be in the simplest position to fix it)
or perhaps both wake up.
I'm seriously considering getting an article posted to some major Linux
news source discussing this blatant GPL abuse (and in some cases I dare
say Copyright infringement) and the KDE team's apparent lack of interest
in the matter. And you damned well better believe the article would
mention my connection to the QPL.
I hate to have to take this track with the KDE project or with Qt, it's
much easier when we're all talking civilly. However as a supporter of the
Linux platform, the GNU project, and Free Software in general, I must at
some point decide that enough is enough.
I've been as polite about this entire fiasco as I could be for well more
than a year now. I'm tired of trying to talk with thim only to discover
I'm speaking to brick walls. Either the legal issues get fixed or we
need to ascertain how well those bricks stack up against a demolitions
crew. Enough is most certainly enough.
> > (If this has been discussed already, a pointer to it will suffice ;-)
>
> Here it goes: http://www.debian.org/News/1998/19981008
That document is woefully out of date. I shall be happy to update it if
others believe an update is warranted. The problem is that the KDE team
falsely claims that the problems outlined therein have been fixed. I'll
leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine what this means.
-- Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org> Debian Linux developer http://tank.debian.net GnuPG key pub 1024D/DCF9DAB3 sub 2048g/3F9C2A43 http://www.debian.org 20F6 2261 F185 7A3E 79FC 44F9 8FF7 D7A3 DCF9 DAB3I sat laughing snidely into my notebook until they showed me a PC running Linux.... And did this PC choke? Did it stutter? Did it, even once, say that this program has performed an illegal operation and must be shut down? No. And this is just on the client. -- LAN Times
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