Re: Intent to package: tkSETI
[Followup-to debian-legal, please.]
On Wednesday 30 June 1999, at 16 h 46, the keyboard of Gopal Narayanan
<gopal@fcrao1.phast.umass.edu> wrote:
> I intend to package tkSETI, a GUI frontend to the SETI@Home client for
> Unix. TkSETI is GPLed.
Remember that GPL cannot be used for a program which is "linked" with a
non-free program. There have been discussions to know if a frontend, which
works only with the underlying non-free program is "linked".
This was the whole issue with KDE, who wanted to be GPL, while linking to a
proprietary library, Qt. The obvious problem is that people send patches to
KDE folks, believing they are contributing to a GPL program, while it wasn't
the case.
> A question for developers: tkSETI the frontend is GPL. But the
> setiathome client is only available as a binary (for both scientific
> and security considerations.
Which are both b...s...
> could compromise their database server). Is tkseti then non-free?
1) The contrib section is here for that (otherwise free programs, but which depends on non-free stuff).
2) This does not solve the GPL issue. In such a case, I convinced an upstream developer (the seaview package depends on Xforms) to switch from GPL to Artistic.
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