Slashdot Mirror

Thanks to all of the fine folks who contributed these updates, you are in for another illuminating, invigorating, inspiring round of fruity nuggets picked from the tree of wisdom, irradiated, waxed, polished, chilled, packaged and shipped (metaphorically) to your browser. Swallow two of these a week, call if symptoms recur.

Who needs an atmosphere? Xibalba writes "As a follow up story to the orbiting Web server, NASA already has an ftp server installed on UoSat-12 and has been sucessfully transferring images for the past week." Soon there should be no shortage of IP-addressable tin cans floating around space.

World domination, increment 00000003707391: xaniamud writes "NVidia have released version 0.93 of their OpenGL XFree86 drivers, check it out." Hopefully, nVidia is interested enough in selling video cards to the faithful to wipe it's nose clean of GPL violations, too.

This time, let's help DivX succeed ... Mike Hicks writes "An update to a previous story. FlashingYellow has combined with OpenCodex, and they now have a $10,000 prize along with an iMac DV for the first individual or group to produce an open source DivX ;-) plugin for Quicktime." Added to which, I will supply the second individual or group with a letterboxed DVD of Carlito's Way, Heat or The Godfather.

You may already be a winner! You may recall that Dr. Günter Bechly recently offered a $3000 incentive to the developers of KDE if the license under which KDE is released were amended such that it could be distributed with Debian's main (free) distribution.

Dr. Bechly has now withdrawn the offer, for the reasons he outlines below. He writes:

"Hello, I just wanted to let everybody know that KDE did not bother to send an official answer to my offer of a donation of $3000 in case that they fix their licence problems that currently prohibits an inclusion of KDE in Debian GNU/Linux. Just two people of the KDE camp answered at all, and both basically said that the licence change is impossible to do since there is too much code of third parties (including those who sent patches) involved who can hardly be traced. This is quite interesting, since in the past most KDE representatives claimed that the licence issue is moot since the requested exception clause in the licence is implicitly given due to the fact that the KDE programmers coded KDE-software for the QT-toolkit. Now they admit that they use a lot of GPL'ed code of non-KDE programmers which have never given such an implicit permission to link their GPL'ed code to QPL'ed libraries.

Just as a reminder: The issue is not how to use KDE with Debian (e.g. by adding the link site to apt-sources), but how to legally include KDE as free software in Debian main. The issue is also neither that KDE is indeed free software nor that QT is indeed free software, but the issue is that the two involved free licences (GPL versus QPL) are mutually incompatible, which makes any distribution of binaries of GPL'ed software that is linked to QT simply illegal! The KDE project obviously does not care at all that it violates the GPL licence of other peoples code. This is not only rude behaviour but simply unacceptable. I hoped that my offer would help to solve the problem, but the reaction or rather the non-reaction of KDE shows that this attempt failed, just like any other attempts to solve this issue before. Apparently KDE and the distributions that include KDE are relying on the mean consideration that private authors of free software will not take the finacial risk to sue them for their licence violation. Maybe the only hope for the final solution of the problem could be that one of these authors proves this consideration to be ill-founded!

Allegations that Debian is just using the licence issue as camouflage for their general dislike of KDE are absolutely unwarranted, since I got only very positive responses from the Debian camp including the Debian leadership. There is no doubt that Debian would happily include KDE as soon as the licence problems are solved. Anyway, it does not look like that is ever going to happen. KDE unfortunately has a long tradition in violating the free software spirit:

1.) It was founded by Matthias Ettrich who developed the very fine program Lyx, but then used the non-free toolkit xforms for its GUI, instead of e.g. using a free alternative like TCL/TK.

2.) When the KDE project was started, it was built on a non-free toolkit, too, since QT1.x was not under QPL or any other free (open source) licence. KDE attempted from the very beginning to become the standard desktop of Linux by using a non-free toolkit. They could not know that QT would later be forced by the outcry in free software community and the attempt to develop a free replacement (Harmony) to release QT2.x under an open source licence (which unfortunately is still not compatabile with GPL).

3.) When the free QT replacement Harmony was still in development (it achieved a rather advanced state!) the KDE project refused to agree to switch to this toolkit in the future and they even announced that they will incorporate any useful new features of future versions of QT, which made it impossible for Harmony to ever reach compatability.

4.) KDE had no problems in the change of the licence of kisdn, which was developed under GPL, and as soon as it was accomplished was transformed into shareware. I am quite certain that they did not ask all people who sent patches for their permission for this licence change!

5.) Finally, KDE is blatantly ignoring their constant violation of the GPL of other peoples software that is used in KDE (e.g. in kflopppy). To sum up: There is no other volunteer project in the Linux world that has shown so much disrespect and ignorance of the free software movement than KDE (just for the record: this is said by someone who used KDE since beta4 and once in a flamewar with Bruce Perens even strongly defended the KDE-project; sorry Bruce, I did you wrong!). Therefore, even though KDE is very nice and usable software, I will say goodbye to all KDE stuff and will now only use Gnome which is rapidly evolving into a comparably mature desktop environment (current Helix-Gnome is certainly as good as KDE 1.1, and forthcoming Gnome 2.0 with Nautilus will be on a level with KDE2 and konqueror). Even koffice will soon be made superflous by The Gimp, Sketch, Sodipodi, Gnumeric, Abiword, gcalender, etc. I hope that many will follow this migration from KDE to Gnome.

My offer of 3000,- $ will not be lost for free software and will now be given to Debian for an improvement of the Debian installer. Further details will be discussed with the Debian project.

With kind regards,
Dr. Günter Bechly

Dontcha love it when life imitates pundits? styopa writes "It seems that TurboLinux and Compaq Computing have announced an Alliance. Compaq will support TurboLinux on all of their platforms. Could this be the beginning of the end of TRU64?" Of course, this was carefully arranged to follow the recent story on Linux mergers, which now seems a bit more relevant. Of course, ZDNet had Compaq pegged for a date with Mandrake, but close enough.

Günter Bechly sent in an interesting open letter to the KDE project regarding KDE, and its current exclusion from Debian (this is of course due to the licensing issues over which wars have been waged, lives lost, and kittens strangled). The letter is attached... he offers a $3k "Bonus" or "Reward" or "Bribe" depending on how you look at it, if KDE will be included with future versions of the distribution. Its an interesting one because the license issues are fuzzy to begin with, but it also shows that there is a strong demand for the software. Then again, I wonder if just hosting the debs and a line for a sources.list might suffice ... or just inclusion in non-free? The following was written by Slashdot Reader Günter Bechly OPEN LETTER TO THE KDE PROJECT Dear KDE team,

in the recent edition of Linux Weekly News of 1st June 2000 the old debate of the potential inclusion of KDE2 to the Debian GNU/Linux distribution is discussed again. Even though KDE2 and QT2 are free software according to all standards (incl. DFSG), KDE2 is not planned to be included in the forthcoming Debian releases 2.2 (aka Potato) and 2.3 (aka Woody), because the QPL licence of QT2 is not compatible with the GPL licence of most of the KDE2 code. An elaboration of Debian's stance on KDE and QT licencing can be found here and here Debian does have a very strict position on such licensing issues, and even if some people may think that their position is somewhat nittygritty, it is a clear point of view that distinguishes Debian from commercial distributions (e.g. Redhat or SuSE).

The sad thing is that many people who like KDE very much, also prefer the Debian distribution because of their very commitment to the free software spirit, because of their high quality standards, because of their superior package management system, and because of their vast number of available packages (about 4500 in Potato). Therefore, it would be highly desirable for KDE AND Debian to solve the mentioned licence problems with the release of KDE2. Many discussions in the past have lead to nothing but frustration on both sides, because none of the involved parties was able to agree on a compromise.

It is possible that the licence issue could be partly resolved by Debian by the simple assumption that all KDE authors who have released their code under GPL have implicitly agreed to link their GPLed code to the QPLed Qt toolkit. However, Debian will not make this assumption, since it would weaken their stance on licence issues, and since it would also not resolve the conflict with third party GPLed code that was used by the KDE project.

Thus, there is only one realistic solution to the problem: All GPLed code in KDE2 has to include a licence that amends the GPL with the following exception clause: "This program is distributed under the GNU GPL v2, with the additional permission that it may be linked against all versions of Troll Tech's Qt library that are distributed under the QPL, and is distributed without the GPL applying to Qt". Of course changing all licences accordingly and contacting all referring authors of the code involves a lot of boring work that is not very attractive for dedicated coders, which might be the reason that the KDE project did not perform this rather simple solution yet. Therefore, I would like to stipulate the appropriate actions by offering a private donation of 3.000,- US-$ to the KDE project, in case (and only in case) that the licence of the official release of KDE2 (all official packages incl. koffice) will be modified in the mentioned way, so that KDE2 can be included in Debian-Woody at last.

The Debian project has already stated in the past that they would of course include KDE as soon as the licence conflicts are resolved. Since the Debian maintainer Ivan E. Moore II has already made inofficial Debian packages of KDE1.x and KDE2beta for the KDE Packaging Project he could likely become the maintainer of the future official packages.

I hope that my offer could contribute to a prospering common future of KDE and Debian for the benefit of the Linux community. It would be nice if I could receive something like an "official" answer by the KDE project concerning my offer. If KDE should agree, I will send a signed contract that guarantees that my donation will be immediately made as soon as KDE2 is released with the Debian compatible licence changes. It is up to the KDE project how my donation would be used; it could be used for any purpose of the KDE project, or even as a personal reward ("salary") for the referring KDE persons that will make the work of the licence changes.

With kind regards,
Guenter Bechly

P.S. Please note that I only speak on behalf of myself and that I am not representing any involved party. I am just an dedicated Linux user who happens to like Debian and KDE (and Gnome too btw ;-). Copies of this letter have been posted to Mosfet, KDE.com, TDYC, Debian, LWN, LinuxToday, and Slashdot.

--
Dr. Guenter Bechly
Staatliches Museum fuer Naturkunde Stuttgart
Abt. Palaeontologie - Sekt. Bernstein
Email (office): bechly@gmx.de Email (private): GBechly@gmx.de