[
let's please not start this thread on -devel, if anyone has questions
or something, feel free to email me and I'll try to answer them as best
I can. I suppose you could mail me flames too, but don't expect
answers to those..
]
On Thu, May 06, 1999 at 05:51:22PM -0400, Dave Neil wrote:
> Bottom line is that Debian has publicly supported QT2's license. If not then how
> about clearing this issue up publicly, have you or not?
The problem is actually a little more complex than that. Qt2's license
is _FINE_, and free. I'm pretty certain of that, given my hand in its
creation. And even if that weren't so, the people on -legal have agreed
it's a free license.
The problem comes whem mixing licenses. The GPL is pretty anal about
this and requires that everything a piece of code is linked with be
placed under the GPL one way or another. Most licenses don't allow you
to change the license just because you want to, and the QPL isn't an
exception.
So the end result is that while the QPL is now free, it's not free enough
for the GPL! This annoys some people on the KDE team and I admit I'm not
pleased with it either.
The solution is not to use the GPL on KDE. I'm working on a license
which is more what the KDE team wants out of their license anyway. It'll
be compatible with the QPL and with the GPL, though obviously if you
include parts of GPL programs into an application which uses Qt you'd
still have to get permission from the author to use the code under the
traditional GPL-with-Qt-exception license, or the license I'm writing for
KDE now.
So this isn't a fix-all, but it would at least fix some of the major
ones. And one more step towards resolution of this mess would be cool.
--
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org> Debian GNU/Linux developer
PGP: E8D68481E3A8BB77 8EE22996C9445FBE The Source Comes First!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
<lux> if macOS is for the computer illiterate, then windoze is for the
computer masochists
Attachment:
pgpkLvzMxpJI5.pgp
Description: PGP signature