Re: KDE liscence question

[Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>]

Goswin Brederlow <goswin.brederlow@student.uni-tuebingen.de> writes:

> John Lapeyre <lapeyre@physics.arizona.edu> writes:
> 
> > *John Travers wrote:
> > > We can't KDE go into non-free, Qt is in there?
> > > I've read all the debian-kde-stance pages but I still don't see why this is so.
> > 	Search the debian-devel archives.  There are probably hundreds of
> > messages on this.   Short answer:  KDE contains some GPL'd code, which links
> > with non-free Qt and this is not allowed by the GPL.  Qt  is merely
> > non-free,  but KDE is illegal. But we should not discuss this much here, as
> > the archives contain  many ellaborations of what I just said.
> 
> The new qt has a free licenze. Thus is goes into main, thus it is a
> system library, or not?
> 
> GPL programs may link against system libraries, even if they are not
> gpl, so kde is fine for main.

This doesn't work, because of the fact that KDE and Qt would be
distributed together:

  However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need
  not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source
  or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so
  on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, UNLESS
  THAT COMPONENT ITSELF ACCOMPANIES THE EXECUTABLE.

[emphasis, mine]

So the answer is that QPL and GPL still don't mix, even though the new
QPL is DFSG free.

> PS: And don't tell me kde can't be part of debian, because it breaks
> the gpl, debian does that a few hounderd times a day.

I didn't.

Cheers, Phil.