I'll agree with everything you say. I probably would have said the same thing myself, but chose to limit my post.
Having been involved in that recent debian-devel discussion which Andreas Pour was a member, I can tell you some of my observations regarding the small subset of Debian developers concerned with the KDE/Qt issue. (I have since left that list due to the extreme acrimony found there)
That group is divided into three factions. The first faction wants to make sure that they do the right thing. They have heard that giving a copy of KDE to your friend is both wrong and illegal, and wish to discern the truth of that rumour. The second group sees nothing illegal about KDE and uses the text of the GPL and copyright case law to make their point. The third group wants nothing to do with KDE and resorts to ad hominem attacks, pointless irrelevancies, deliberate obfuscation, and when all else fails, personal mudslinging.
Are you a copyright holder? If yes, you have a problem. You will need to get Wine to remove your code if their new license is not acceptable.
If you are not a copyright holder then tough beans. Submission of small patches does not make you an owner. This is not the stock market, you do not get a share of the ownership. If you submitted larger pieces of code and neglected to include your own copyright statements on them, then you have only yourself to blame.
It would be nice if the KDE folks could issue a statement on whether GPL'd stuff could be linked to Qt2
But the problem is, there's absolutely no reason to do this than to appease a few Debian developers. Of course it can be linked! This isn't a case of you deriving from GPLd code in order to link to Qt, which may be problematic. The original GPLd code itself already links to Qt.
To summarize, the GPL imposes no restrictions upon the original author, who chose to link with QT. And Qt is included with every major distribution including Debian, and the GPL makes exceptions for code included with the OS. Furthermore, the source code for Qt is included with every major distribution, including Debian. Finally, you have implicit permission to link KDE to Qt by the very fact that it already does so. In fact, I would consider the include statements to be more on the order of explicit permissions.
If you don't want to assign the rights away to your bugfix, perhaps you should think about forking the codebase. After all, if you don't want your code held hostage by the author, perhaps he doesn't want his held hostage by your bugfix.
What someone could do with a public work is to package it up in a compilation or something, without letting their customers know that the work is also available in the public domain, then seek damages against anyone who makes copies of the compilation.
If such a company sought damages they would be laughed out of court. Get real here! I could set up a photocopier in front of the Penguin offices and run off copies of "The Aeneid" all day long and there's nothing they could do to me.
I think you misunderstood me. BSD authors have no problems at all with GPL authors using their code. They have a big problem with people attempting to subvert the copyright.
But the key word here is "use". If all you do is fiddle with a few bytes, you can't relicense it. It's not a separate work. It's against copyright law. The BSDL does not grant users the right to relicense, only sublicense. License your work as a whole under the GPL, but keep the BSD license intact with the BSD source code, as required by the BSDL.
Troll Tech is taking a most sensible approach to licensing. Open Source for open source developers and Proprietary for proprietary developers. What could be simpler? It's certainly a better incentive to switch to open source development than RMS' exhortation not to use the LGPL.
Qt Pro is more than twice W2K+VCPPPro? Let me know where you're buying your Microsoft products at, because I can't get them for that price. Yes, it's more expensive, but don't exaggerate.
But if I understand your situation, I see an easy way out of it. I am under the impression that you are in the hardware sales business, but have some proprietary software of your own to support it. That software in turn links to other proprietary code. Since software is not your primary business, open source your OWN code, make sure that only that code links with Qt, and you're smooth sailing. The other proprietary code doesn't come into play if it doesn't link with Qt, since the QPL (like any license) is nonbinding on third parties.
As of today, Debian does not intend to include KDE2+Qt2. Before they will, Qt will either have to be released under the LGPL or all of KDE2 will have to be released under a non-GPL license. I don't foresee either scenario.
I personally think that a few members of Debian are deliberately blocking KDE2. They do this through intentional misinterpretations of the GPL and outright FUD. The last I heard, one of them was trying to find someone willing to sue KDE and get a restraining order so that it couldn't be distributed with ANY distribution.
Although they have myriad reasons for not including KDE2, all of those reasons are based upon non-existance or misapplied laws, or extremely convoluted interpretations of the GPL. In one particularly bizarre instance, a Debian developer accused Troll Tech of GPL violations because KDE linked to it!
There is nothing stopping Debian from including KDE2, but so long as Debian has to please 600 developers before anything can get done, it won't happen.
I don't mind at all if derivatives are under the GPL. But I do get annoyed when the only reason you put it under the GPL is because you have a political disagreement with my license.
You are correct. It is a very good idea to reject any bugfix patches that contain their own copyright notice. For any contributions that are larger than this, the author should contact the submitter and request that rights be assigned before it gets rolled in.
We are in the year 2000, and people are still writing software and using tools like it's the 1970's.
First of all, C++ is from the 1980's. You're off by a decade. Second, the alternative to C++ for system programming is C, which is from the 1960's, even earlier.
I fail to see what KDE has to do with Windows. I haven't used Windows for a long time, but as I recall, the only thing Windows did UI-wise was put a frame around a window and slap a task bar on the bottom of the screen. Replace the task bar with the Gnome panel, KDE panel, Wharf, Dock or IconBox, and you still have essentially the same thing. Yet this criticism is ALWAYS leveled at KDE and never at Gnome, WindowMaker or Enlightenment.
In terms of look and feel, there is no comparison between Windows and KDE2 beyond the use of windows, icons and mice.
I checkedout KDE2 and KOffice this weekend and gave it a runthrough. Very impressive.
No, it's not stable yet, that's why they call it "pre-alpha". But it's still very nice and I can't wait for the final release.
It looks gorgeous! Makes Gnome look like it was drawn with crayons (hey, it's a joke, stop the flames alright!) Kudos Mosfet! It also loads much, much faster than KDE1 or Gnome. Konqeror kicks butt. KOffice will make Bill Gates very nervous when it's released. He should get his resume cleaned up:-)
In short, KDE 2.0 will be the first Free Software desktop with the quality and finish that commercial users expect (but never get).
Similarly, if there were no government-granted monopoly, there'd be no need for a GPL!
If there were no copyrights, then everything would be in the public domain. Thus, I would have absolutely zero restrictions upon taking YOUR works closed source! Stop listening to the GNU propaganda. The purpose of the GPL is to protect the rights of the author, period. But if there were no copyrights involved, the author would have no rights at all to protect!
Your comparison of the GPL to the police is strange. What makes the combination of YOU+GPL more like the police than the combination of SUN+MPL? Are you more equal than they?
What in the world are you thinking! Public Domain works are owned by NOBODY! There is no way in Heck they can be proprietarized. If GreedyPublisherInc puts out a new edition of "Alice in Wonderland" and slaps a copyright on it, the original text STILL EXISTS. There is no way that GreedyPublisherInc can stop you, I or AltruisticPublisherLLC from issuing their own copies.
Since there is absolutely no way anyone can remove public domain works from the public domain, I can only assume that your scheme is for the sole purpose to destroy commercial printings of uncopyrighted works. Because that would be the only result.
Remember, public domain works are owned by NOBODY. If you succeed in putting them under a copyleftist license, you will have REMOVED them from the status of the unowned, and made Guttenberg the COPYRIGHT HOLDER! What are you thinking!
But it is at least debatable whether exercising an artificial, government-granted monopoly to control an idea is "freedom" rather than "exploitation".
It's a debate that's been going on for three hundred years by thinkers more brilliant than us. But no matter how you look at it, it still applies to the GPL, which hinges upon a government granted monopoly. Either the GPL is exploitative or it is not. If it is not, than neither is any copyright Sun uses for it's own creations.
Anyone who uses any license would be wise to reject any patch that is under a separate copyright. Once you do so you lose control of your own software.
But a minor patch that is not separately copyrighted belongs to the original author when included in the original work. Notice that I said "minor". Your submitting a patch to correct my "foo++" to a "++foo" will give you absolutely zero rights to my code, even after I include the patch.
So a company that releases software under the GPL is within its legal rights to rerelease it under a closed source license EVEN if they have accepted your patch.
The major difference between Sun licensing their own products their own way, and your pyramid scheme, as that your scheme hinges upon an act of fraud.
People are called zealots who call fraud freedom, but then turn around and call freedom exploitation. If you want to play games with the English language, try scrabble.
Is that why it takes 50 packages in Debian to equal the one emacs package of any other distro? Hey! I'm joking! Stop the mailbombing okay!
Seriously, Debian seems to have a greater atomicity with their packages, but that's not the only reason they have 4500 packages. I mean, they have *my* applications as packages too! You can't get much more desperate than that:-)
Uh, if you take a look, Slack is sitting on store shelves. And it don't need a GUI installer, because the text installer it already has is far easier and robust that anything else. Yes, it's bare bones. That's the whole joy of Slack! No dangly bits of cruft or suffocating fluff.
Has anyone actually found the time to even try all the 4500 packages in Debian? Or the thousands in Redhat, Mandrake and SuSE? I've been burned too often using the "default" installation that I choose "custom" whenever possible. But there's no way in hell I'm going to spend two hours of install time just choosing packages.
Who needs 600 chiefs? Slackware takes the smart route by only have a few chiefs, then letting the rest of Open Source take care of their own packages. Unlike Debian, it doesn't take Slack six months to make a decision. But I guess if you have 4500 packages, you have to have maintainers for them.
Why does Debian need 50 support lists? Slack gets by just fine with only one. How does one know which list to ask? Somehow I suspect that the most common reply in the Debian lists is "Wrong list, RTFFAQ!"
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah, I forgot. The license determines the bloat and cruft. Thanks for reminding me. Now go learn how to program.
I'll agree with everything you say. I probably would have said the same thing myself, but chose to limit my post.
Having been involved in that recent debian-devel discussion which Andreas Pour was a member, I can tell you some of my observations regarding the small subset of Debian developers concerned with the KDE/Qt issue. (I have since left that list due to the extreme acrimony found there)
That group is divided into three factions. The first faction wants to make sure that they do the right thing. They have heard that giving a copy of KDE to your friend is both wrong and illegal, and wish to discern the truth of that rumour. The second group sees nothing illegal about KDE and uses the text of the GPL and copyright case law to make their point. The third group wants nothing to do with KDE and resorts to ad hominem attacks, pointless irrelevancies, deliberate obfuscation, and when all else fails, personal mudslinging.
Are you a copyright holder? If yes, you have a problem. You will need to get Wine to remove your code if their new license is not acceptable.
If you are not a copyright holder then tough beans. Submission of small patches does not make you an owner. This is not the stock market, you do not get a share of the ownership. If you submitted larger pieces of code and neglected to include your own copyright statements on them, then you have only yourself to blame.
It would be nice if the KDE folks could issue a statement on whether GPL'd stuff could be linked to Qt2
But the problem is, there's absolutely no reason to do this than to appease a few Debian developers. Of course it can be linked! This isn't a case of you deriving from GPLd code in order to link to Qt, which may be problematic. The original GPLd code itself already links to Qt.
To summarize, the GPL imposes no restrictions upon the original author, who chose to link with QT. And Qt is included with every major distribution including Debian, and the GPL makes exceptions for code included with the OS. Furthermore, the source code for Qt is included with every major distribution, including Debian. Finally, you have implicit permission to link KDE to Qt by the very fact that it already does so. In fact, I would consider the include statements to be more on the order of explicit permissions.
If you don't want to assign the rights away to your bugfix, perhaps you should think about forking the codebase. After all, if you don't want your code held hostage by the author, perhaps he doesn't want his held hostage by your bugfix.
What someone could do with a public work is to package it up in a compilation or something, without letting their customers know that the work is also available in the public domain, then seek damages against anyone who makes copies of the compilation.
If such a company sought damages they would be laughed out of court. Get real here! I could set up a photocopier in front of the Penguin offices and run off copies of "The Aeneid" all day long and there's nothing they could do to me.
I think you misunderstood me. BSD authors have no problems at all with GPL authors using their code. They have a big problem with people attempting to subvert the copyright.
But the key word here is "use". If all you do is fiddle with a few bytes, you can't relicense it. It's not a separate work. It's against copyright law. The BSDL does not grant users the right to relicense, only sublicense. License your work as a whole under the GPL, but keep the BSD license intact with the BSD source code, as required by the BSDL.
Troll Tech is taking a most sensible approach to licensing. Open Source for open source developers and Proprietary for proprietary developers. What could be simpler? It's certainly a better incentive to switch to open source development than RMS' exhortation not to use the LGPL.
Qt Pro is more than twice W2K+VCPPPro? Let me know where you're buying your Microsoft products at, because I can't get them for that price. Yes, it's more expensive, but don't exaggerate.
But if I understand your situation, I see an easy way out of it. I am under the impression that you are in the hardware sales business, but have some proprietary software of your own to support it. That software in turn links to other proprietary code. Since software is not your primary business, open source your OWN code, make sure that only that code links with Qt, and you're smooth sailing. The other proprietary code doesn't come into play if it doesn't link with Qt, since the QPL (like any license) is nonbinding on third parties.
As of today, Debian does not intend to include KDE2+Qt2. Before they will, Qt will either have to be released under the LGPL or all of KDE2 will have to be released under a non-GPL license. I don't foresee either scenario.
I personally think that a few members of Debian are deliberately blocking KDE2. They do this through intentional misinterpretations of the GPL and outright FUD. The last I heard, one of them was trying to find someone willing to sue KDE and get a restraining order so that it couldn't be distributed with ANY distribution.
Although they have myriad reasons for not including KDE2, all of those reasons are based upon non-existance or misapplied laws, or extremely convoluted interpretations of the GPL. In one particularly bizarre instance, a Debian developer accused Troll Tech of GPL violations because KDE linked to it!
There is nothing stopping Debian from including KDE2, but so long as Debian has to please 600 developers before anything can get done, it won't happen.
I don't mind at all if derivatives are under the GPL. But I do get annoyed when the only reason you put it under the GPL is because you have a political disagreement with my license.
You are correct. It is a very good idea to reject any bugfix patches that contain their own copyright notice. For any contributions that are larger than this, the author should contact the submitter and request that rights be assigned before it gets rolled in.
We are in the year 2000, and people are still writing software and using tools like it's the 1970's.
First of all, C++ is from the 1980's. You're off by a decade. Second, the alternative to C++ for system programming is C, which is from the 1960's, even earlier.
I fail to see what KDE has to do with Windows. I haven't used Windows for a long time, but as I recall, the only thing Windows did UI-wise was put a frame around a window and slap a task bar on the bottom of the screen. Replace the task bar with the Gnome panel, KDE panel, Wharf, Dock or IconBox, and you still have essentially the same thing. Yet this criticism is ALWAYS leveled at KDE and never at Gnome, WindowMaker or Enlightenment.
In terms of look and feel, there is no comparison between Windows and KDE2 beyond the use of windows, icons and mice.
I checkedout KDE2 and KOffice this weekend and gave it a runthrough. Very impressive.
:-)
No, it's not stable yet, that's why they call it "pre-alpha". But it's still very nice and I can't wait for the final release.
It looks gorgeous! Makes Gnome look like it was drawn with crayons (hey, it's a joke, stop the flames alright!) Kudos Mosfet! It also loads much, much faster than KDE1 or Gnome. Konqeror kicks butt. KOffice will make Bill Gates very nervous when it's released. He should get his resume cleaned up
In short, KDE 2.0 will be the first Free Software desktop with the quality and finish that commercial users expect (but never get).
Similarly, if there were no government-granted monopoly, there'd be no need for a GPL!
If there were no copyrights, then everything would be in the public domain. Thus, I would have absolutely zero restrictions upon taking YOUR works closed source! Stop listening to the GNU propaganda. The purpose of the GPL is to protect the rights of the author, period. But if there were no copyrights involved, the author would have no rights at all to protect!
Your comparison of the GPL to the police is strange. What makes the combination of YOU+GPL more like the police than the combination of SUN+MPL? Are you more equal than they?
What in the world are you thinking! Public Domain works are owned by NOBODY! There is no way in Heck they can be proprietarized. If GreedyPublisherInc puts out a new edition of "Alice in Wonderland" and slaps a copyright on it, the original text STILL EXISTS. There is no way that GreedyPublisherInc can stop you, I or AltruisticPublisherLLC from issuing their own copies.
Since there is absolutely no way anyone can remove public domain works from the public domain, I can only assume that your scheme is for the sole purpose to destroy commercial printings of uncopyrighted works. Because that would be the only result.
Remember, public domain works are owned by NOBODY. If you succeed in putting them under a copyleftist license, you will have REMOVED them from the status of the unowned, and made Guttenberg the COPYRIGHT HOLDER! What are you thinking!
But it is at least debatable whether exercising an artificial, government-granted monopoly to control an idea is "freedom" rather than "exploitation".
It's a debate that's been going on for three hundred years by thinkers more brilliant than us. But no matter how you look at it, it still applies to the GPL, which hinges upon a government granted monopoly. Either the GPL is exploitative or it is not. If it is not, than neither is any copyright Sun uses for it's own creations.
Anyone who uses any license would be wise to reject any patch that is under a separate copyright. Once you do so you lose control of your own software.
But a minor patch that is not separately copyrighted belongs to the original author when included in the original work. Notice that I said "minor". Your submitting a patch to correct my "foo++" to a "++foo" will give you absolutely zero rights to my code, even after I include the patch.
So a company that releases software under the GPL is within its legal rights to rerelease it under a closed source license EVEN if they have accepted your patch.
I think these are objective facts...that's how I see it.
Please get out your dictionary and look up the word "objective"...
The major difference between Sun licensing their own products their own way, and your pyramid scheme, as that your scheme hinges upon an act of fraud.
People are called zealots who call fraud freedom, but then turn around and call freedom exploitation. If you want to play games with the English language, try scrabble.
Is that why it takes 50 packages in Debian to equal the one emacs package of any other distro? Hey! I'm joking! Stop the mailbombing okay!
:-)
Seriously, Debian seems to have a greater atomicity with their packages, but that's not the only reason they have 4500 packages. I mean, they have *my* applications as packages too! You can't get much more desperate than that
So why not include a single foo.bar.1.4 with the joeschmoe fix? Is there any reason to keep the broken version around?
Since when do Slack users have to recompile kernels or rebuild X? Since when do you have to compile anything? Have you even used Slack?
Uh, if you take a look, Slack is sitting on store shelves. And it don't need a GUI installer, because the text installer it already has is far easier and robust that anything else. Yes, it's bare bones. That's the whole joy of Slack! No dangly bits of cruft or suffocating fluff.
That's the beauty of Slackware!
Has anyone actually found the time to even try all the 4500 packages in Debian? Or the thousands in Redhat, Mandrake and SuSE? I've been burned too often using the "default" installation that I choose "custom" whenever possible. But there's no way in hell I'm going to spend two hours of install time just choosing packages.
Who needs 600 chiefs? Slackware takes the smart route by only have a few chiefs, then letting the rest of Open Source take care of their own packages. Unlike Debian, it doesn't take Slack six months to make a decision. But I guess if you have 4500 packages, you have to have maintainers for them.
Why does Debian need 50 support lists? Slack gets by just fine with only one. How does one know which list to ask? Somehow I suspect that the most common reply in the Debian lists is "Wrong list, RTFFAQ!"