Re: KDE not in Debian?

[John Lapeyre <lapeyre@physics.arizona.edu>]

*David Johnson wrote:
> Joseph Carter wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> I think what you're seeing is a lack of urgency rather than a lack of
> interest. A lot of the *new* KDE applications, including most of
> KOffice, are not under the GPL. But why change the old licenses (playing
> the devil's advocate)? They have given explicit and public permission
> for everyone to distribute KDE. That some people delude themselves into
> thinking such permission has not been given is irrelevant to KDE.
> 
   Who is "they" in "they have given ..." ?  If I understand correctly, the
issue is that chunks of GPL'd code (I never heard how much) have been included 
in KDE.  This code was written previously by people who are not associated
with KDE. KDE can not add a clause allowing linking with non-free libraries
to the license on this code because they are not the copyright holder of this code.

One question I have never seen addressed, maybe Joseph knows: How much of 
this code is in KDE? Have these authors been contacted? Have they refused
to change their license ?  It seems relatively simple, but I must be missing
something.  If these other authors are asked for a modified license, then
they either say OK, or "no you can only have my code under the GPL".  In
the latter case, we would have a clear issue that would have been discussed
publically by now.  It would look bad for KDE and they might try to 
put pressure on TT or to write replacement code. But I never saw any
reports one way or another on the position of the copyright holders.
  Also, why did RH start distributing KDE ?  IIRC it was because they 
thought that a effort was being made in good faith to solve the problem
with qt 2.0 .

     John


-- 
John Lapeyre <lapeyre@physics.arizona.edu>,  lapeyre@debian.org
Tucson,AZ     http://www.physics.arizona.edu/~lapeyre