I hadn't seen that; it's an interesting piece. I don't think it's accurate in terms of how 'the public' will view Microsoft, but it may be accurate in terms of how companies will react.
OTOH, they -do- follow through with threats to some extent. Not to the extent of revoking licenses, but they did hold back critical development information from IBM, and their sliding scale 'cooperativeness' pricing on Windows licenses is a well-established fact. So, their threats aren't -entirely- hot air.
Well, in this particular case, it definitely is. Having a highly profitable corporation in your state means lots of jobs and lots of money for everyone. MS pays state taxes as well as any more political considerations, so MS probably funds a good portion of every kids education.
It also looks a whole lot better to say 'oh, I think Bill's a great guy and I support him and he supports me' than to take money behind closed doors. Either way you look like a political prostitute, but if you're up front about it, at least you're an -honest- whore, right?
Keep it in mind if you ever move to the US and run for office.:)
It is rather detailed, and does show much more than this. Particularly, it shows ms incurring great costs for the sole purpose of impeding netscape and introductions of applications that would rely on netscape's API rather than windows.
Actually, I thought it was more important that the finding of fact showed that Microsoft ordered intel to stop the development of NSP, undermined Java with proprietary protocols, -and- clobbered Netscape. IANAL and you are, but, I thought it was the -pattern- of anti-competitive actions that made an anti-trust suit strong.
Also, I think not having an NSP-equivalent technology five years after Intel had developed it will be more compelling 'consumer harm' to that nitpicky appeals court if the case goes there after all. I'm not sure anyone other than developers (and Judge Jackson:)) really appreciates the harm done by undermining cross-platform development, but 'this technology existed, but customers never got it because MS said no' is crystal clear.
At least Derek's looks, from armchair-law point of view, to be possibly enforceable against him. Not know UK law in detail, or -any- precedents that set scope, who knows for sure.
If they went after someone in the US where we actually -have- a right of free speech and don't have (that I know of) laws against distributing information that enables the circumvention of copy protection... well, here, at least, we could defend against this kind of charge. I think.
Point 1 - This isn't the post-anything; no verdict or penalties have been rendered, MS stock is not dropping as expected.
Point 2 - MS hasn't lost anything except that Dell and Compaq, etc, are willing to risk distributing Linux boxes. MS still holds dominant & growing shares of IE, which, if unrestrained, they can leverage into making the web into a network of proprietary MS protocols. We Linux users can still use our Linux boxes in such a world,... as long as we're okay with not being able to read online-newspapers, participate in online-auctions, or view online streaming videos...
Point 3 - If you were the press, would you want to risk a lawsuit for libel from the worlds biggest corporation? It's no wonder the mainstream press has been slanted. (Well, that, and mainstream American culture glorifies greed and wealth over any other aspiration. Gates is certainly successful on -that- account.)
In counterpoint to my own points - a guilty verdict is certain, given this finding of fact, and MS -will- be restrained in some way or another. Eventually. After the appeals process has been muddled through. What form of penalties and controls there will be, and what effect they will have, remains to be seen.
In any case, at best, this is the pre-possibly-post-Microsoft era, for whatever that's worth.
Oh, and go Mozilla, 'architecturally complete' M11 due out early this week. Features and stability work in coming months.:)
Interesting, but I wonder how effective your patents are? Have you ever successfully licensed or defended them?
This sounds like a nice option for open-source advocates who just want to make sure that one of us has the patent on some new idea rather than some big company, but I'm not at all certain these patents will be as effective as a professionally prepared one.
I used to think that just disclosing your idea was the best way to deal with it, then it'd be prior art, right?
But, in the patent-law discussion slashdot had not long ago it was said that you can patent any idea that hasn't been published -more than one year- previously. So, if I publish an idea, there's 12 months in which anyone else can patent my idea.
Not so good.
Anyway, the patent -system- is bad, and you can use patents in a bad way, but -having- a patent is not necessarilly bad. The 'I'll cross license with all comers' model basically undermines the patent ystem and forces predatory patent holders to behave, at least with respect to your own company. And a policy of 'anything meeting OSF guidelines for free software can use this patent royalty free, all others need a contract or cross-license' wouldn't be bad either. --Parity
I'm running kernel 2.2.9 on my Debian-slink system along with a number of other pieces not included in the distribution, none of which comes from the 'unstable' branch. One of the things I like about Debian is it doesn't get in your way if you want to download, compile, and install your own stuff.
For those pieces I don't need the latest-greatest for, I use packages from stable- for everything else, I compile. No problem.
I -have- downloaded pieces from unstable before, but I've always been disappointed with the results, and the same with importing precompiled binaries from non-Debian sources. There's always another library to deal with. Compile yourself and you know you're linked to the library version that you have.
For people that are terminal introverts, meeting other people is a serious problem. You only feel comfortable opening up among people you know, but people can only get to know you if you open up... I'm sure many of you know the problem.
Somehow, online makes it a -lot- easier to just open up and talk, express yourself... that leads to flamewars, among other bad things, but it can also be a good thing.
I have a personal rule, which is that no matter how intimate we feel online, nothing is decided before we've met iRL. Online is a good way to meet people and to talk, but it's a very different thing from being in someone's rl presence.
It's also a good idea to have a 'safety'; the world does have nutty people out there. Make sure someone knows where you're going, who you're meeting, and expects you to contact back at a particular time. This advice probably applies more strongly to female geeks than males, but it wouldn't hurt men to be a little careful too. And, of course, meet for the first time in a public place, with other people around.
AOL is contractually obligated to use IE through 2001, unless the courts overturn that. By that time, if there's no other browser on the scene, IE will be the only web browser, and the web will be a microsoft proprietary interface.
Barring gov't action against Microsoft, we -have- lost the war. AOL isn't going to save anything. Mozilla or Netscape or Opera in combination with gov't action might.
That came out of left field... all the hype has been about xfs, and now this.
I wonder, though, how GPL purists are going to react, since their business model is to be GPL but sell GPL-exceptions to some companies.
I suspect that the project will quickly fork into Reiser-FS-commercial and Reiser-FS-pureGPL as soon as a contributor refuses to license a GPL-exception.
I wonder if anyone here has heard of this before? Beta-tested it? Maybe I'll try it tomorrow. (I want to keep my machine running tonight, so I can't very well replace the fs.:))
MAC addresses belong to your NIC which can be interchanged.
MAC addresses are easily spoofable; many NICs allow you to set the MAC address in firmware.
Also...
People do complain about IPv6 because it includes a protocol of assign-IP-addresse-based-on-MAC-address.
Mmmm. Also, my NIC is totally irrelevant to my internet access. It's for networking to friends who bring laptops over. It'd be a lousy identifier 'cause I can take it out 90% of the time.
Every computer needs a CPU - which would be a lot more expensive to change than a $20 NIC, and finally, nobody ever tried to conceal the fact that NICs have unique MAC addresses.
Ah! Good point. Even if nothing comes of -this- case I could do worse things with my money than joining the EFF. Thanks for the reminder, I think I have a check to write now. (Besides I want the book...:))
Since the author himself doesn't know who had is site shutdown, I'd say it's unlikely anyone here does.
I also think that filling a corporate inbox with flames is unlikely to affect their legal department. Maybe their sysadmins would quit in frustration and they'd go under from a lack of digital infrastructure... but I doubt it.
If there's going to be a major court battle, it's going to get expensive. I hear a lot of talk about what is/isn't prosecutable around here, but when it actually comes to a case, does the open source movement have a legal defence fund?
I know the FSF has a legal team, but I've never heard that they'd do anything but enforce the GPL. Would they get involved in this kind of thing?
So, what do text-to speech converters do with misspelled words with syllables omitted, like "inconvience", "incandent", "nutrious", and many others? This is the one most-compelling reason to once again set up my Amiga 1000, just to see what happens. (Understandable text-to-speech included as standard, late 1985.)
Install festival on a linux box instead; it's fun, it's easy, it runs on cheap hardware. Admittedly, it'll be bloody slow on your 386, but it calculates the sound first and then plays it, it doesn't calculate on the fly so even on slow hardware like your 386 the speech should come out okay.
To answer the question, for the most part, you get pronounced-as-spelled. Though, with festival at least, it wouldn't be hard to add misspelling correction functionality. It already converts '----' into 'line of hyphens' and '====' into 'line of equals' and so on. More annoying is words like 'read.' "I like to read science fiction" becomes "I like to red science fiction" instead of "I like to reed science fiction." I set my MUSH client up to pipe everything to festival. It was cool. A little perl and some named pipes were necessary to make it non-blocking. I think it would be trivial to tee lynx into festival but I haven't actually tried it, the redraw-efficiency of curses might make gibberish out of it other than the initial draw. Still, source exists, it'd be an easy hack to make a for-the-blind lynx/festival combo. (Of course, blind computer users probably want a speech synthesis card if they can afford it... the slowness of soft synthesis is painful).
Having skimmed this comments, I just want to say - a car can be used to run people down, a microphone can be used to spy on people, a hammer can be used to cave in the skull, and did you all know a computer can be used to tabulate and cross reference personal information?
When I read the article, I thought - if it can relay signals, it can control artificial as well as real limbs, bridge gaps in the nervous system when reattaching severed limbs, and thinking about, you could 'filter out' palsies and ticks, cut off signals to motor nerves with the onset of a grand mal epileptic seizure - essentially downgrading it to petit mal...
Emotional control? Reduce anxiety (and presumably cutting off pain can be done too) for people undergoing surgery while conscious, not to mention treatment for depression, bipolar disorders, paranoid schizophrenia... any other emotion-related mental illness.
If you're worried about the big-brother possibilities, stay or become involved in politics and make sure there are laws protecting people. Personally, I think this kind of technology is a good thing. --Parity
Really, honestly, it should be illegal to write a story like this, and a felony offence to film one. We just need to apply the law equally. Then the next time all the cable channels make a fictionalized account of some well-publicized crime we can arrest them all and get something decent on the air instead...
Slashdot should not remove any posts until and unless they receive a court order... if they remove posts voluntarily, then they become responsible for monitoring slashdot's boards. If they remove posts when 'brought to their attention' then they become responsible to everyone who sends an e-mail flame complaining about a post here.
If they wait for a court order, then they've only shown that they can remove posts when served a court order. I think.
Of course, what they should really do is contact their lawyers (or get a lawyer pdq) and discuss the issue. Maybe deliberately crash the slashdot box to get breathing time while trying to decide the issue.:) But without having talked to a lawyer, I think defending common-carrier defense is more important than just about any other issue.
Y'know, obvious one-liners like this really don't deserve to be moderated up to a 5...
And, y'know, coarse humour doesn't deserve to be moderated down to -1. There's no reason not to let it float around at 1.
It's a waste of everybody's time and moderation points to be bouncing this up and down like that, and since this thread started I've seen this head go from 5->4->0->5... what do you want to bet it goes down again by the time I finish this comment?
Really, trying to moderate -anything- 'funny' above a two is pretty wasteful because it'll either be 'unfunny' 'cause it's lame or 'unfunny' 'cause it's offensive and everyone who has a different sense of humour is going to moderate it down. (Conversely slamming coarse humor to -1 is going to get bounced back up with a vengeance) so... go find something better to do with those points, like an insightful or two...
Sorry, I should've been clearer... I wouldn't use a GPL'd library in my own software, and I would not be inclined to contribute to GPL'd libraries or projects using GPL'd libraries.
Obviously if lib-apt is a GPL'd library I'm going to be using applications that depend on GPL'd libraries.
Every day on my way home from work I see this huge billboard. Last month it was American Beauty. Before that, iMac. Right now, it reads:
ATHLON: The fastest CPU in the world.
Between that and all the writeups that are being done, it sounds like publicity to me... Of course, I haven't watched TV since the Athlon came out so, I don't know, maybe Intel has the edge in TV ads.
There are all kinds of freedom, sure, however, if you release a library, you presumably intend other programs to link against it.
The only purpose for releasing a library on the GPL instead of the LGPL is to force all programs linking against it to be GPL'd. RMS has -said- this. This is what he -wants-... the idea being every time a license conflict occurs, the other software will be legally forced to comply with the GPL by becoming GPL until the whole world (or at least lots of software) is GPL.
So... well, personally, I wouldn't use a GPL'd library. Ever. For anything. But people have gotten used to libraries being LGPL'd. When a GPL'd library comes along, it's easy to make the mistake (unless you're already looking for it.)
(I am, BTW, a Debian Linux user and happy to use GPL'd apps and LGPL'd libraries).
The only way for the Qt library to comply with a GPL'd library is for the Qt library to become GPL'd or LGPL'd, which Qt didn't want to do. So the options are an exception in the GPL'd library or completely changing the license on the Qt library (which is not going to happen).
Slashdot Mirror
I hadn't seen that; it's an interesting piece. I don't think it's accurate in terms of how 'the public' will view Microsoft, but it may be accurate in terms of how companies will react.
OTOH, they -do- follow through with threats to some extent. Not to the extent of revoking licenses, but they did hold back critical development information from IBM, and their sliding scale 'cooperativeness' pricing on Windows licenses is a well-established fact. So, their threats aren't -entirely- hot air.
--Parity
Well, in this particular case, it definitely is. Having a highly profitable corporation in your state means lots of jobs and lots of money for everyone. MS pays state taxes as well as any more political considerations, so MS probably funds a good portion of every kids education.
:)
It also looks a whole lot better to say 'oh, I think Bill's a great guy and I support him and he supports me' than to take money behind closed doors. Either way you look like a political prostitute, but if you're up front about it, at least you're an -honest- whore, right?
Keep it in mind if you ever move to the US and run for office.
--Parity
Try reading the FofF . . .
It is rather detailed, and does show much more than this. Particularly, it shows ms incurring great costs for the sole purpose of impeding netscape and introductions of applications that would rely on netscape's API rather than windows.
Actually, I thought it was more important that the finding of fact showed that Microsoft ordered intel to stop the development of NSP, undermined Java with proprietary protocols, -and- clobbered Netscape. IANAL and you are, but, I thought it was the -pattern- of anti-competitive actions that made an anti-trust suit strong.
Also, I think not having an NSP-equivalent technology five years after Intel had developed it will be more compelling 'consumer harm' to that nitpicky appeals court if the case goes there after all. I'm not sure anyone other than developers (and Judge Jackson
--Parity
At least Derek's looks, from armchair-law point
of view, to be possibly enforceable against him.
Not know UK law in detail, or -any- precedents
that set scope, who knows for sure.
If they went after someone in the US where we
actually -have- a right of free speech and don't
have (that I know of) laws against distributing
information that enables the circumvention of
copy protection... well, here, at least, we could
defend against this kind of charge. I think.
--Parity
Point 1 - This isn't the post-anything; no verdict or penalties have been rendered, MS stock is not dropping as expected.
... as long as we're okay with not being able to read online-newspapers, participate in online-auctions, or view online streaming videos...
:)
Point 2 - MS hasn't lost anything except that Dell and Compaq, etc, are willing to risk distributing Linux boxes. MS still holds dominant & growing shares of IE, which, if unrestrained, they can leverage into making the web into a network of proprietary MS protocols. We Linux users can still use our Linux boxes in such a world,
Point 3 - If you were the press, would you want to risk a lawsuit for libel from the worlds biggest corporation? It's no wonder the mainstream press has been slanted. (Well, that, and mainstream American culture glorifies greed and wealth over any other aspiration. Gates is certainly successful on -that- account.)
In counterpoint to my own points - a guilty verdict is certain, given this finding of fact, and MS -will- be restrained in some way or another. Eventually. After the appeals process has been muddled through. What form of penalties and controls there will be, and what effect they will have, remains to be seen.
In any case, at best, this is the pre-possibly-post-Microsoft era, for whatever that's worth.
Oh, and go Mozilla, 'architecturally complete' M11 due out early this week. Features and stability work in coming months.
--Parity
Interesting, but I wonder how effective your patents are? Have you ever successfully licensed or defended them?
This sounds like a nice option for open-source advocates who just want to make sure that one of us has the patent on some new idea rather than some big company, but I'm not at all certain these patents will be as effective as a professionally prepared one.
--Parity
I used to think that just disclosing your idea was the best way to deal with it, then it'd be prior art, right?
But, in the patent-law discussion slashdot had not long ago it was said that you can patent any idea that hasn't been published -more than one year- previously. So, if I publish an idea, there's 12 months in which anyone else can patent my idea.
Not so good.
Anyway, the patent -system- is bad, and you can use patents in a bad way, but -having- a patent is not necessarilly bad. The 'I'll cross license with all comers' model basically undermines the patent ystem and forces predatory patent holders to behave, at least with respect to your own company. And a policy of 'anything meeting OSF guidelines for free software can use this patent royalty free, all others need a contract or cross-license' wouldn't be bad either.
--Parity
I'm running kernel 2.2.9 on my Debian-slink system along with a number of other pieces not included in the distribution, none of which comes from the 'unstable' branch. One of the things I like about Debian is it doesn't get in your way if you want to download, compile, and install your own stuff.
For those pieces I don't need the latest-greatest for, I use packages from stable- for everything else, I compile. No problem.
I -have- downloaded pieces from unstable before, but I've always been disappointed with the results, and the same with importing precompiled binaries from non-Debian sources. There's always another library to deal with. Compile yourself and you know you're linked to the library version that you have.
--Parity
For people that are terminal introverts, meeting other people is a serious problem. You only feel comfortable opening up among people you know, but people can only get to know you if you open up... I'm sure many of you know the problem.
Somehow, online makes it a -lot- easier to just open up and talk, express yourself... that leads to flamewars, among other bad things, but it can also be a good thing.
I have a personal rule, which is that no matter how intimate we feel online, nothing is decided before we've met iRL. Online is a good way to meet people and to talk, but it's a very different thing from being in someone's rl presence.
It's also a good idea to have a 'safety'; the world does have nutty people out there. Make sure someone knows where you're going, who you're meeting, and expects you to contact back at a particular time. This advice probably applies more strongly to female geeks than males, but it wouldn't hurt men to be a little careful too. And, of course, meet for the first time in a public place, with other people around.
--Parity
AOL is contractually obligated to use IE through 2001, unless the courts overturn that. By that time, if there's no other browser on the scene, IE will be the only web browser, and the web will be a microsoft proprietary interface.
Barring gov't action against Microsoft, we -have- lost the war. AOL isn't going to save anything. Mozilla or Netscape or Opera in combination with gov't action might.
--Parity
That came out of left field... all the hype has been about xfs, and now this.
:))
I wonder, though, how GPL purists are going to react, since their business model is to be GPL but sell GPL-exceptions to some companies.
I suspect that the project will quickly fork into Reiser-FS-commercial and Reiser-FS-pureGPL as soon as a contributor refuses to license a GPL-exception.
I wonder if anyone here has heard of this before? Beta-tested it? Maybe I'll try it tomorrow. (I want to keep my machine running tonight, so I can't very well replace the fs.
--Parity
MAC addresses belong to your NIC which can be interchanged.
MAC addresses are easily spoofable; many NICs allow you to set the MAC address in firmware.
Also...
People do complain about IPv6 because it includes a protocol of assign-IP-addresse-based-on-MAC-address.
Mmmm. Also, my NIC is totally irrelevant to my internet access. It's for networking to friends who bring laptops over. It'd be a lousy identifier 'cause I can take it out 90% of the time.
Every computer needs a CPU - which would be a lot more expensive to change than a $20 NIC, and finally, nobody ever tried to conceal the fact that NICs have unique MAC addresses.
Well, you -did- ask.
--Parity
Ah! Good point. :))
Even if nothing comes of -this- case I could do worse things with my money than joining the EFF. Thanks for the reminder, I think I have a check to write now. (Besides I want the book...
--Parity
Since the author himself doesn't know who had is site shutdown, I'd say it's unlikely anyone here does.
I also think that filling a corporate inbox with flames is unlikely to affect their legal department. Maybe their sysadmins would quit in frustration and they'd go under from a lack of digital infrastructure... but I doubt it.
--Parity
If there's going to be a major court battle, it's going to get expensive. I hear a lot of talk about what is/isn't prosecutable around here, but when it actually comes to a case, does the open source movement have a legal defence fund?
I know the FSF has a legal team, but I've never heard that they'd do anything but enforce the GPL. Would they get involved in this kind of thing?
--Parity
I don't know about richochet in particular, but generally speaking, bandwidth and latency are mutually exclusive tradeoffs.
Larger packet size->less header info->more useable bandwidth / spend longer collecting bytes at each end before each packet
high compression->less physical bytes transmitted->more bandwidth / more time compressing/decompressing
--Parity
So, what do text-to speech converters do with misspelled words with syllables omitted, like "inconvience", "incandent", "nutrious", and many others? This is the one most-compelling reason to once again set up my Amiga 1000, just to see what happens. (Understandable text-to-speech included as standard, late 1985.)
Install festival on a linux box instead; it's fun, it's easy, it runs on cheap hardware. Admittedly, it'll be bloody slow on your 386, but it calculates the sound first and then plays it, it doesn't calculate on the fly so even on slow hardware like your 386 the speech should come out okay.
To answer the question, for the most part, you get pronounced-as-spelled. Though, with festival at least, it wouldn't be hard to add misspelling correction functionality. It already converts '----' into 'line of hyphens' and '====' into 'line of equals' and so on.
More annoying is words like 'read.' "I like to read science fiction" becomes "I like to red science fiction" instead of "I like to reed science fiction."
I set my MUSH client up to pipe everything to festival. It was cool. A little perl and some named pipes were necessary to make it non-blocking. I think it would be trivial to tee lynx into festival but I haven't actually tried it, the redraw-efficiency of curses might make gibberish out of it other than the initial draw. Still, source exists, it'd be an easy hack to make a for-the-blind lynx/festival combo. (Of course, blind computer users probably want a speech synthesis card if they can afford it... the slowness of soft synthesis is painful).
--Parity
Having skimmed this comments, I just want to say - a car can be used to run people down, a microphone can be used to spy on people, a hammer can be used to cave in the skull, and did you all know a computer can be used to tabulate and cross reference personal information?
When I read the article, I thought - if it can relay signals, it can control artificial as well as real limbs, bridge gaps in the nervous system when reattaching severed limbs, and thinking about, you could 'filter out' palsies and ticks, cut off signals to motor nerves with the onset of a grand mal epileptic seizure - essentially downgrading it to petit mal...
Emotional control? Reduce anxiety (and presumably cutting off pain can be done too) for people undergoing surgery while conscious, not to mention treatment for depression, bipolar disorders, paranoid schizophrenia... any other emotion-related mental illness.
If you're worried about the big-brother possibilities, stay or become involved in politics and make sure there are laws protecting people. Personally, I think this kind of technology is a good thing.
--Parity
Really, honestly, it should be illegal to write a story like this, and a felony offence to film one. We just need to apply the law equally. Then the next time all the cable channels make a fictionalized account of some well-publicized crime we can arrest them all and get something decent on the air instead...
:) )
(For the humour impaired:
--Parity
Slashdot should not remove any posts until and unless they receive a court order... if they remove posts voluntarily, then they become responsible for monitoring slashdot's boards. If they remove posts when 'brought to their attention' then they become responsible to everyone who sends an e-mail flame complaining about a post here.
:) But without having talked to a lawyer, I think defending common-carrier defense is more important than just about any other issue.
If they wait for a court order, then they've only shown that they can remove posts when served a court order. I think.
Of course, what they should really do is contact their lawyers (or get a lawyer pdq) and discuss the issue. Maybe deliberately crash the slashdot box to get breathing time while trying to decide the issue.
--Parity
Y'know, obvious one-liners like this really don't deserve to be moderated up to a 5...
... what do you want to bet it goes down again by the time I finish this comment?
And, y'know, coarse humour doesn't deserve to be moderated down to -1. There's no reason not to let it float around at 1.
It's a waste of everybody's time and moderation points to be bouncing this up and down like that, and since this thread started I've seen this head go from 5->4->0->5
Really, trying to moderate -anything- 'funny' above a two is pretty wasteful because it'll either be 'unfunny' 'cause it's lame or 'unfunny' 'cause it's offensive and everyone who has a different sense of humour is going to moderate it down. (Conversely slamming coarse humor to -1 is going to get bounced back up with a vengeance) so... go find something better to do with those points, like an insightful or two...
Sorry, I should've been clearer...
I wouldn't use a GPL'd library in my own software, and I would not be inclined to contribute to GPL'd libraries or projects using GPL'd libraries.
Obviously if lib-apt is a GPL'd library I'm going to be using applications that depend on GPL'd libraries.
Every day on my way home from work I see this huge billboard. Last month it was American Beauty. Before that, iMac. Right now, it reads:
ATHLON: The fastest CPU in the world.
Between that and all the writeups that are being done, it sounds like publicity to me...
Of course, I haven't watched TV since the Athlon came out so, I don't know, maybe Intel has the edge in TV ads.
There are all kinds of freedom, sure, however, if you release a library, you presumably intend other programs to link against it.
The only purpose for releasing a library on the GPL instead of the LGPL is to force all programs linking against it to be GPL'd. RMS has -said- this. This is what he -wants-... the idea being every time a license conflict occurs, the other software will be legally forced to comply with the GPL by becoming GPL until the whole world (or at least lots of software) is GPL.
So... well, personally, I wouldn't use a GPL'd library. Ever. For anything. But people have gotten used to libraries being LGPL'd. When a GPL'd library comes along, it's easy to make the mistake (unless you're already looking for it.)
(I am, BTW, a Debian Linux user and happy to use GPL'd apps and LGPL'd libraries).
The only way for the Qt library to comply with a GPL'd library is for the Qt library to become GPL'd or LGPL'd, which Qt didn't want to do. So the options are an exception in the GPL'd library or completely changing the license on the Qt library (which is not going to happen).
An LGPL'd library would not have this problem.