On Thu, Jan 20, 2000 at 02:01:46PM -0800, Bruce Perens wrote: > Let's not get offensive, please, Craig. Joseph is very definitely not > responsible for QPL issues. I did my best. There were some "last minute revisions" to my work I'm not terribly happy with... As for Craig... *shrug* He's only echoing words I've read hundreds of times. IIRC, he's also one of those who told me in the first place that I shouldn't bother trying because KDE was beyond help from me or from anyone else. As noted in another message, it appears he and the others like him were right one and all. KDE is beyond help because when it comes right down to it, they don't want to help themselves. > The last time I heard, the way the KDE application developers were going > to resolve this issue was to dual-license their applications, under the > GPL and either the LGPL or the QPL, either of which is QPL-compatible. Yes, this is what I believed. However a year later it's just not happening. And nobody in the KDE project seems to have any interest or desire to do something about it. This leads me to the conclusion that this debacle will never be resolved and my efforts were in vain. I believed I was working with people who were honestly trying to better the situation for the good of all. Their apparent good faith was little more than an attempt to appease the large numbers of people who knew they were doing something illegal. If KDE really cared about its legal foundations, they would most likely have fixed the problems by now and this discussion would be totally nonexistant. > This preserves the GPL for some future date when there might be a > second-source version of Qt like Harmony, and allows the applications to > be distributed with no legal quibbles. Harmony, of course, died the second Qt was under an Open Source license and KDE promised the license issues would be dealt with as soon as they could do so. Given that Troll Tech's employees are all contributors to KDE (and major ones at that) it would seem at least plausable that this whole debacle may well have been Troll Tech's way of killing off the competition Harmony would provide if it gained any steam. Of course I'm not usually that paranoid, but then perhaps that _WAS_ the intent and I'm simply naive enough to fall for it. It's pretty obvious that Troll Tech is happy that KDE depends upon them and the alternative is dead. It's also to their very convenient advantage that they can distance themselves as a company from the legal ramifications of what the KDE project is doing. And as a bonus, most people believe there are no more legal issues because KDE said what remained would be fixed very soon. -- 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 DAB3 <Kethryvis> Gruuk: UFies are above and beyond the human race :)
Attachment:
pgp1xruhivz2D.pgp
Description: PGP signature