Re: including Qt on Debian
On Fri, 31 Oct 1997, Andreas Jellinghaus wrote:
: > Could you please explain to me why you don't want to include Qt on
: > the Debian distribution ?
:
: its not free software : we may not change it, may not fix bugs,
: and if
that's a side issue. you can fix bugs, but you have to submit them to
somebody, whether this is GNU software or commercial.
Let me indulge you for a second: I noticed that you guys added the
bigphysarea patch to the 2.0.30 kernel. I wrongly assumed that this was
part of the STANDARD kernel distribution. When I downloaded the 2.0.31
kernel from a different source, I was unpleasantly surprised that the
patch wasn't there anymore - i rely on it so my framegrabber works.
Now I am wondering whether the bigphys area patch will work with newer
kernels.
So in the case of Qt, or any other software (GPL I presume), just "fixing"
bugs doesn't really do anything because the fixes are not part of the
official distribution. You have to give your fixes to someone who
controls the program/package. It is pretty irrelevant whether this is
GPL software or free commercial software.
: the company doesn't like us, they can change the licence and forbit us
: to use it any longer.
very unlikely. They want Qt to succeed. You can always just ship the
binary versions of the Qt toolkit. This doesn't contravene any licensing.
: we may not even ship our binaries (because we modified the source :
: adding debian control files)
: without their explizit permission, and we
why did you do that ? i can understand changing the .rpm package to .deb,
but in essence the software is the same, just different packaging.
Did you actually modify the software or did you just add some files to the
archive ? if you just added some files to the archive, then you don't
have to ask anybody any permission.
: have to reget this permission for each version again.
this is only a small inconvenience.
: you see : debian may never depend on qt !
: andreas
: p.s.: we offer qt in our non-free section, as long as we are allowed.
: p.p.s.: kde binaries are also available
I know. I am going to ask the KDE people to make 2 versions of the
software, since it is the only way some people want to listen. One
version will be dynamically linked and the other one statically (hence
absolutely NO licensing restrictions are made). Would you then include it
as part of your linux distribution ?
btw, this is what Qt was trying to change: the bloatedness of statically
linking libraries, which everybody has to do with Motif. Qt is free to
use. I really don't understand this idealism that something is either
completely free or not free at all.
Conrad Sanderson
Microelectronic Signal Processing Laboratory
Griffith University
Queensland Australia
--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-devel-request@lists.debian.org .
Trouble? e-mail to templin@bucknell.edu .
Reply to: