KDE vs. Debian GPL-statements (Fwd: Re: proposal of a paragraph of GPL v.3)
Hi all,
I've contacted RMS on the issue of the GPL-conflict in KDE. As I interpret
the first paragraph in his answer it should be ok for all Code that was
originated in the KDE project, because the authors did intend to link against
Qt. Problematic may be all the code outside of it like the ghostview code in
kghostview. One had to check the licenses of these code parts to allow
Qt-linkage.
I believe KDE is not the only project which might have such problems and it
will probably become even trickier the more and the more complex software
will appear as free software/open source. I think we have to find an easy
_and_ good solution for that, how long it will ever take....
Konrad
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Subject: Re: proposal of a paragraph of GPL v.3
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2000 20:43:13 -0600 (MDT)
From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
Debian seems to state that it might be a violation of plain, unmodified
GPL to link against Qt.
That is true. However, if the authors of the program clearly intended
it to be linked against Qt, I would say they have given some kind of
implicit permission for people to do that.
Following common practice of all
other GPL'ed project it seems to be ok to link even against proprietary
libc-versions.
The GPL explicitly gives permission for this narrow exception.
My proposal is to add a section to GPL which clearifies how term
"modification" should be threated. It should just express common practice:
"linking and using a GPL'ed program/lib from a non-GPL'ed one is prohibited,
but using a library of any license from a GPL'ed program/lib is ok".
This would introduce a giant loophole. For example, suppose you want
to make a proprietary extension in GCC. So you make your code (or the
guts of it) into a library and invoke this exception. No way!
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