Re: Can we pull KDE?
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On Mon, 7 Sep 1998, Remco Blaakmeer wrote:
>On Sun, 6 Sep 1998, Raul Miller wrote:
>
>> Supposedly, we have a policy of only distributing code for which we
>> have a license. With one notable exception (KDE) we've consistently
>> said: either the author needs to fix the license, or we don't distribute
>> the package.
[...]
>> I think we should just pull the kde packages out of debian. When new
>> packages are available with proper copyrights, we can distribute those.
>
>The whole thing with KDE seems to be, that KDE's GPL license and qt's
>license have a major conflict[1]. The result from this is, that KDE can
[...]
>I say, drop KDE. Just like Red Hat did, and for the same reason.
Two things are bothering me here about this reasoning:
1) Unless my memory fails me, the KDE people have offered to
change the license to a GPL-with-exception-clause for QT
2) We have a small number of other packages where the author has
also expressed an intent to change the license (or the
library) for the next version, but the current version has
this problem.
If we are to be consistent about this, we should go through all
the packages that link with qt, check them for GPL, and anything that
is GPL also must be pulled. If we don't do this, dropping KDE due to
the fact that a new version with a new license has not yet been
released is nothing more than persecution.
My own stance on this is that we should completely drop KDE for a
much more serious reason: unless I also misremember this, KDE is
currently incorporating GPL'd code written by people outside of the
KDE project that have never consented to having their code used in a
project linked to a proprietary library, and on top of this, this
means that KDE cannot even legally change their own license away from
the GPL, since to do so would require the consent (relicensing) of all
the authors the code of whom has been incorporated. Since that is
unlikely to happen, I am willing to consider KDE a lost cause, and
remove it completely from Debian specifically for that reason -- that
the problem can no longer be corrected.
Now that it has been demonstrated that a voting mechanism can be
made to function, I would like to see the proposed Constitution
finally implemented, and a technical committee actually created and
empowered, since this is exactly the kind of thing that would be best
handled by that form of leadership.
If you believe strongly that this is an issue that needs to be
immediately resolved, I suggest that you call for a vote on whether or
not the rest of the developers think it needs to be resolved before
the technical committee is properly constructed. Should that vote
pass, it would not be unreasonable to call for a second vote on
whether or not we should immediately remove KDE from the
distribution. Giving two weeks for each voting period, that will
possibly give you an answer in one months time.
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Zed Pobre <zed@va.debian.org> | PGP key on servers, fingerprint on finger
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