Please, feel free to make your own icon sets, themes, and other stylistic contributions to KDE. You can make KDE look exactly like Gnome, Enlightenment, or anything else. It's a volunteer effort and all, including American artists:-) are welcome to contribute.
USERS can decide the look of KDE whenever and whereever they want. KDE2 provides all the tools. The "KDE is ugly" argument no longer holds any water whatsoever. It's as beautiful or as ugly as YOU want it to be!
Most LaTeX developers are more interested in creating an XML frontend for LaTeX. LaTeX would then serve as a formatting engine for XML-structured documents.
LaTeX is primarily a typeseting engine. It does
not have a parser but is compiled like code. A public XML frontend would be useful because, with a parser, it makes it easier and faster to find errors without running the LaTeX compile cycle.
For more on the interaction of LaTeX and SGML, see
http://www.latex-project.org/guides/ltx3info/nod e2.html
and especially
http://www.latex-project.org/guides/ltx3info/nod e4.html
PDF is actually a great, OPEN, format (like PS). It's really great for (La)TeX applications. PDFTeX (http://tug.org/applications/pdftex/index.html) is just AMAZING! ps2pdf on Ghostscript is very close to being a Distiller killer (for my purposes it only needs
better compression). And Ghostscript definitely works better than Acrobat 3.0 in many ways.
PDF was a great contribution. On the commercial front though, Linux just has not been able to fit into their business plans. Adobe can and should be criticized fiercely for this, but don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
About not being able to read other PDF's, part of the problem lies in the way the original pdfs were created and way Distiller was configured when they were created (the option to embed all fonts is not the default, so many are probably just unaware of the problem). Also, some newer PDF 4.0 files cannot be read with old 3.0 readers. So it's not all Adobe's fault! You could email the companies whose catalogs you can't read and tell them to check their Distiller settings. I'm sure they want your business so their marketing products will probably look into it.
The following is more informative than the official response, in my opinion. Despite being a KDE fan, I always held RMS in the highest respect and esteem, miles above anyone else in the free software community. This latest stunt of his has forced me to moderate said respect and esteem downwards. The authors of the statement below point out the perhaps hypocritical nature of some of RMS's comments in his editorial.
=================================
http://devel-home.kde.org/~granroth/personally.h tml
On Stallman on Qt, the GPL, KDE and
GNOME
Many of us woke up this morning and read Richard Stallman's editorial on Linux Today with a
growing sense of incredulity. At first, some of us thought it was a joke -- it didn't make any logical sense, after all. But after it sunk in that Stallman was doing yet another snowjob on KDE, a lot of our incredulity turned to anger. If you want the official KDE position on his editorial, go here. But if you want to know how a few KDE developers feel, read on.
Stallman has been a longtime detractor of the KDE Project. So much so, that his Free Software
Foundation helped start a project whose only purpose was to be an "anti-KDE" -- GNOME. The
GNOME developers themselves have gotten past all that and have created something that stands
on its own merits. Stallman, though, seems to still be stuck in the past with his "KDE is bad, use GNOME to punish them" mantra.
Basically, Stallman saw that with Qt under the GPL, all of his licensing problems went away. Ergo, there was nothing for him to fall back on anymore. So he comes up with this notion that we have to beg forgiveness of our copyright holders or we will be in violation of the GPL forever.
Beg forgiveness? What kind of bullshit is this?
It's definitely two-faced, that's for sure. Why? Because in all of the scores of emails over several years, he never once said a single word about this. Never. Not even recently when Trolltech approached him to give his "blessing" on the Qt license change.
In fact, the first time this has ever come up was when he saw that KDE isn't quite so evil anymore.
So he creates a 'lex KDE' - a special rule that only applies to KDE.
Don't get us wrong; we could understand and accept that Stallman would still push GNOME over
KDE -- it is under the GNU umbrella after all. That's fine. What isn't fine is inventing special rules after the fact just to bash KDE. This is hardly fair play.
Just KDE, you ask? Yes! In all previous cases of potential GPL violations over the years (and
there have been a lot), a license change was accepted as a cure. No mention of "forgiveness" has ever been uttered. We even accepted it, for example, on copyright violations done by GNOME.
When they removed KDE copyright notices from code they copied from us (khtmlw), a simple
email discussion was enough to fix the problem. At no time did we demand that they beg our
forgiveness for their violation -- it's just not something that rational adults do.
So what we are left with is a childish, spiteful act by somebody who clearly can't stand to see us
survive. Enough's enough -- we have bent over backwards to ensure that all license issues are
resolved once and for. We will not enter into his game anymore.
signed by:
Waldo Bastian
Daniel Duley (Mosfet)
Matthias Elter
Matthias Ettrich
Kurt Granroth
Simon Hausmann
Rik Hemsley
Sirtaj S. Kang (Taj)
Lars Knoll
Richard Moore
Sven Radej
Cristian Tibirna
Robert Williams
You people on Slashdot are amazing. The comment about Gnome was obviously a gentle poke at Motif, and a compliment to Gnome. Your irrational hatred of KDE/Qt is stopping you from thinking straight.
Interpretations of that event differ. But even if what you say is correct, the use of that bomb on civilians was wrong. America could have taken some of the Japanese to a demonstration of the bomb instead. The Japanese were not idiots. And even if, somehow, the first bombing could be justified, there is no way to justify Nagasaki.
In any case, many of the documents to which you refer only point out the degree to which Americas leaders went to justify their horrendous act. There were equally plausible alternatives; the generals wanted a real test of that bomb; no one can deny that.
I stated very clearly at the beginning of my original post that I despise communism; I never said that there should be mere government handouts for minorities either.
And as for the Soviets, 2 wrongs don't make a right. The lives of people in the Third World are no less precious than those of Americans; the brothers, sisters, and mothers of each of the untold thousands of victims of US global arrogance are just as bereaved as any of the comparatively very, very few American victims of terrorism by others. And American foreign policy still is based on realpolitik: the lives of other people around the world are of interest only insofar as much as they serve US foreign policy interests; so many people who have resigned in disgust from the State Dept. can tell you that.
I also said that there _is_ a difference between America and China; the Chinese are much less hypocritical. And the anti-Chinese propoganda makes the situation there appear to be worse than it is in reality.
> Third, I do not believe that millions of African > lives were lost. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps.
This statement is as ridiculous and as unfounded as the denial of the Holocaust, perhaps more so. Slave boats frequently had a survival rate of only 10 percent (from capture to ship to market to plantation-or-whereever to work). For a given x million slaves who survived the journey (where x is greater than 3-I don't remember exactly), this translates into tens of millions who lost their lives.
the atomic bomb drop on Japan (critical historians have pointed out that Japan was going to surrender and that the drop was a test),
purposely igniting the civil war in Guatemala during the 50's (55,000 dead),
installing and vigorously propping the brutal Pinochet in Chile,
deposing Iran's democratic goverment to reinstall the Shah and a brutal dictatorship in 1953,
supporting and funding Israel's continued brutal and underreported bombing campaign in southern Lebanon, including hospitals and schools, as well as their continued reign of terror against the Palestinians through the systematic ethnic cleansing of the occupied territories and Jerusalem,
Corporate diamond interests are behind the recent savage civil war in Sierra Leone (a diamond-rich country); when one government refuses them the concessions they want, the start a civil war,
the continued oppression of hispanics, blacks, and native americans through various not-so-subtle misallocations of government and corporate dollars
the perpetuation of underpaid and exploited underclasses in Third World countries to keep the standard of living high in the "First World"
extensive and pervasive use of prison labor by corporations to cheaply manufacture goods and provide services (this phenomenon finds America at her most hypocritical with respect to the Chinese)
As for Tiannamen Square, the US alone has instigated innumerable such instances among its puppets in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, the Phillipines, the former Iran of the Shah, Israel and Palestine, Latin America. Trust me, if there were to ever be a popular revolt here, do you really think the goverment will not use real bullets to suppress it?
At least the Chinese are honest; the West and Western capitalist do even worse things, but are more sophisticated in their use of propoganda to fool people. I wish I had more time for details and references, but other posters appear to be doing the job
I have generally remained neutral in the pro-ESR, anti-ESR debate. Reading his comments on China definitely moves me closer to the anti-ESR camp. While I despise communism, ESR's approach to the subject is nothing but pure (and yes, naive) demagoguery of the worst kind. There is not a single atrocity committed by the Chinese that has not been exceeded by corporate capitalism and the governments that more-or-less serve their interests. ESR is clearly pandering to those interests that pay his consulting fees. That's fine as long as he does not claim to speak on behalf of everyone.
I truly hope that Linux and the free software movement continue their global advance, whatever the local colorings are. In a corporate capitalist country like the USA, this movement may take on capitalist overtones; in China it may take on communist overtones; in Iran it may take on Islamic overtones. But the movement as a whole belongs to the World. If Linux/Open Source/Free Software is too good for the PRC, then it's certainly too good for the corporate capitalist interests that ESR appears to desire to serve and please.
The point is that Red Hat claims to be using the DSFG/OpenSource guidelines. On this basis, they are being hypocritical. To be honest, they should say that they do not agree with those guidelines and that they are holding some "higher" standard. You can't have it both ways: you can't just pick and choose which DSFG-free software is really free if you adhere to the DSFG in the first place. About http://www.gnu.org/software/software.html: "free software" is not equivalent to "GNU software": there is a lot of free software not mentioned on that page that is free and even GPL/LGPL. Besides, look closely at what that page actually says: "These are some additional Non-GPL-covered free programs which we think it is useful to mention." The list does not claim to be exhaustive.
Another point is that you cannot do "whatever you like" with GPL software. I can't sell it and keep the source to myself for example
Finally, there was some discussion between RMS and Troll Tech about the issue you hghlighted (6c), but RMS still considers Qt 2.x as free software. The bottom line is that one must be consistent in one's use of the word `free'. When you say "I can't call this free software also" you are using the word `free' in a different sense than what the Open Source/DSFG guidelines state. This is OK as long as there is one is clear about what one is doing.
I stand by my statement that Red Hat is playing the politics of division.
>To qualify as an exclusively Free Software >product as defined by the FSF, this four CD set >does not contain Netscape, Qt, KDE, and several >additional non-open-source packages which are >available in other Linux products.
Note that Red Hat here does NOT distinguish Qt 1.x (old license) from Qt 2.x. Qt 2.x IS "free" according to FSF guidelines (and RMS himself) and should have been included. By being unclear and fuzzy on this issue, Red Hat is playing the usual politics of division, something I thought they had grown out of. Qt 2.x as a toolkit is independent of KDE and can be used outside of that context (just as Gtk is independent of GNOME and even of the GIMP). Red Hat knows this quite well; leaving it out is clearly an attempt to discourage the use of this particular "free software" in any context.
Some have said that this is a "hackers" distribution. Well in that case, then those interested in hacking KDE 2.0 (which uses the FSF-free Qt) could have benefitted from the inclusion of both the latest KDE sources as well as Qt! Or Red Hat could have included the sources of the present KDE official version (also DSFG-free) so that hackers could work on compiling it with Qt 2.0. Doing so would have gone some way in showing that this is not merely an anti-Qt/KDE distribution.
Note that Red Hat did not call this a "GPL-only" distribution. So one cannot claim that since Qt 2.x is non-GPL that this is the reason it was not included. This is clearly a pathetic attempt to throw a bone to all the KDE haters out there. Those who do not like KDE should also see this and not let their sentiments be played with so casually. Red Hat would have been more honest to simply call this thing a "non-KDE, non-Qt distribution" instead of falsely and shamelessly hiding behind the DFSG and RMS (who himself agrees that Qt 2.x is free!).
I used to be a big Red Hat fan. With each childish stunt like this, my opinion of them is being continuously revised downward. I hope that KDE lovers, haters, as well as neutral parties will all see through this divisive political stunt.
Anyone who owns a Qt professional edition license for Windows can compile whatever he/she wants on Windows and release it for free, even code from another developer (I read something to this effect on a posting by, if I remember correctly, a Troll Tech employee on one of the KDE lists a few months ago). If one or two developers who own such Qt professional licenses want to form a new organization, say www.freecompile.org, for free Qt-based projects on Windows, they could do so. So poor programmer X can write his/her program on X11, compile & test it, send source to developer @freecompile.org, let it get compiled and posted as freeware for Windows. This is perfectly legal as far as I know and provides the foundation for what I believe is a real solution. Surely there are at least one or two profesional Qt developers willing to contribute to this. If not, a group of, say, 25 interested freeware programmers for Windows can form freecompile.org, contribute $40 each to buy a single license for one developer (perhaps someone working on a very important OSS project as well), who will then personally compile freeware for Windows. An advantage to this scheme for Troll Tech is that they will not have to worry about someone sneaking off and selling their application; freecompile.org will keep a list of all contributions.
The above are meant to be just initial ideas. Hopefully some discussion based on this will generate a real solution. (Wouldn't that be amazing?! An actual SOLUTION to a problem generated by a Slashdot discussion!)
Rather, I think it is more likely that they want to keep up with KDE, which is about to release 1.1.2 (though some developers wanted this to be 1.2) and which is on the way to delivering on 2.0!
Re:Mosfet KDE Interview about KDE future on Linux.
on
The Future of GNOME
·
· Score: 1
I submitted this story about the KDE interview. Let's see what Slashdot does (bets anyone)?.
1. Don't believe your own government's propoganda. Iran is not a terrorist country; the US has, by its own admission, sponsored far more terrorism than Iran in the last few decades (Guatemala since the fifties, Chile after 1970, Nicaragua during the eighties, even in Iran itself, and others too numerous to mention).
2. Iran is a republic which has held every single federal and local election on time since it was founded in 1979. There are more women in Iran's parliament than in the entire US congress. Iran is by all accounts a much freer country than Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other US allies in the Middle East. They do have problems like everyone else but most of the invective against them is a reaction against the Iranian people's attempt to i) even dare try to have a political-economic system not based on European principles of secular humanism; ii) limit Western attempts, be they cultural, economic, or ideological, to dominate Middle Eastern life in general and Muslim culture in particular.
Iran does not need anyone's patronizing or condescending approval of any so-called "Islamic Reformation". Islam is fine just the way it is. Iran is merely going through the same kinds of growing pains the American and French revolutions went through. This talk of whether the free software movement should include Iran is really sickening and hypocritical when one considers all of the pain and suffering caused in the world by the policies of the US, Canada, and Europe over the past two centuries.
Nonanonymous posting of even more controversial ideas in response to anonymous flamebait voicing standard propoganda.
>Unfortunately, this will not be sufficient to >ensure the success of KDE. The prohibitive >cost of licensing Qt for commercial development >ensures that most shareware and >small proprietary software developers will write >for the Gnome desktop This is pure (if unintentional) FUD. You do not need Qt to write KDE-compliant applications. One possible reason why FUD like this is continually spread (note that I am not saying that the author of the above post is to blame) is that there are commercial interests that want to have a QT-quality and relatively easy-to-use toolkit without having to pay for it. So they claim that Harmony is needed in order to write KDE-compliant applications.
>Hackers who prefer KDE to Gnome should strongly support the continuation of Harmony
In other words, work hard to give commercial interests a free ride. I really hope noone buys this. The interests of the free software movement are much better served by a GPL'd Harmony.
Slashdot Mirror
This is an insightful & informative response. Once Warwick gets his 5 points, please moderate me down:-)
Samawi
Please, feel free to make your own icon sets, themes, and other stylistic contributions to KDE. You can make KDE look exactly like Gnome, Enlightenment, or anything else. It's a volunteer effort and all, including American artists:-) are welcome to contribute.
USERS can decide the look of KDE whenever and whereever they want. KDE2 provides all the tools. The "KDE is ugly" argument no longer holds any water whatsoever. It's as beautiful or as ugly as YOU want it to be!
Samawi
Most LaTeX developers are more interested in creating an XML frontend for LaTeX. LaTeX would then serve as a formatting engine for XML-structured documents.
d e2 .html
d e4 .html
LaTeX is primarily a typeseting engine. It does
not have a parser but is compiled like code. A public XML frontend would be useful because, with a parser, it makes it easier and faster to find errors without running the LaTeX compile cycle.
For more on the interaction of LaTeX and SGML, see
http://www.latex-project.org/guides/ltx3info/no
and especially
http://www.latex-project.org/guides/ltx3info/no
Samawi
PDF is actually a great, OPEN, format (like PS). It's really great for (La)TeX applications. PDFTeX (http://tug.org/applications/pdftex/index.html) is just AMAZING! ps2pdf on Ghostscript is very close to being a Distiller killer (for my purposes it only needs
better compression). And Ghostscript definitely works better than Acrobat 3.0 in many ways.
PDF was a great contribution. On the commercial front though, Linux just has not been able to fit into their business plans. Adobe can and should be criticized fiercely for this, but don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
About not being able to read other PDF's, part of the problem lies in the way the original pdfs were created and way Distiller was configured when they were created (the option to embed all fonts is not the default, so many are probably just unaware of the problem). Also, some newer PDF 4.0 files cannot be read with old 3.0 readers. So it's not all Adobe's fault! You could email the companies whose catalogs you can't read and tell them to check their Distiller settings. I'm sure they want your business so their marketing products will probably look into it.
Samawi
This is actually quite funny:
http://www.ubersoft.net/d/20000906.html
The following is more informative than the official response, in my opinion. Despite being a KDE fan, I always held RMS in the highest respect and esteem, miles above anyone else in the free software community. This latest stunt of his has forced me to moderate said respect and esteem downwards. The authors of the statement below point out the perhaps hypocritical nature of some of RMS's comments in his editorial.h tml
=================================
http://devel-home.kde.org/~granroth/personally.
On Stallman on Qt, the GPL, KDE and
GNOME
Many of us woke up this morning and read Richard Stallman's editorial on Linux Today with a
growing sense of incredulity. At first, some of us thought it was a joke -- it didn't make any logical sense, after all. But after it sunk in that Stallman was doing yet another snowjob on KDE, a lot of our incredulity turned to anger. If you want the official KDE position on his editorial, go here. But if you want to know how a few KDE developers feel, read on.
Stallman has been a longtime detractor of the KDE Project. So much so, that his Free Software
Foundation helped start a project whose only purpose was to be an "anti-KDE" -- GNOME. The
GNOME developers themselves have gotten past all that and have created something that stands
on its own merits. Stallman, though, seems to still be stuck in the past with his "KDE is bad, use GNOME to punish them" mantra.
Basically, Stallman saw that with Qt under the GPL, all of his licensing problems went away. Ergo, there was nothing for him to fall back on anymore. So he comes up with this notion that we have to beg forgiveness of our copyright holders or we will be in violation of the GPL forever.
Beg forgiveness? What kind of bullshit is this?
It's definitely two-faced, that's for sure. Why? Because in all of the scores of emails over several years, he never once said a single word about this. Never. Not even recently when Trolltech approached him to give his "blessing" on the Qt license change.
In fact, the first time this has ever come up was when he saw that KDE isn't quite so evil anymore.
So he creates a 'lex KDE' - a special rule that only applies to KDE.
Don't get us wrong; we could understand and accept that Stallman would still push GNOME over
KDE -- it is under the GNU umbrella after all. That's fine. What isn't fine is inventing special rules after the fact just to bash KDE. This is hardly fair play.
Just KDE, you ask? Yes! In all previous cases of potential GPL violations over the years (and
there have been a lot), a license change was accepted as a cure. No mention of "forgiveness" has ever been uttered. We even accepted it, for example, on copyright violations done by GNOME.
When they removed KDE copyright notices from code they copied from us (khtmlw), a simple
email discussion was enough to fix the problem. At no time did we demand that they beg our
forgiveness for their violation -- it's just not something that rational adults do.
So what we are left with is a childish, spiteful act by somebody who clearly can't stand to see us
survive. Enough's enough -- we have bent over backwards to ensure that all license issues are
resolved once and for. We will not enter into his game anymore.
signed by:
Waldo Bastian
Daniel Duley (Mosfet)
Matthias Elter
Matthias Ettrich
Kurt Granroth
Simon Hausmann
Rik Hemsley
Sirtaj S. Kang (Taj)
Lars Knoll
Richard Moore
Sven Radej
Cristian Tibirna
Robert Williams
The designer is under the GPL!!! What more do you want?!?
You people on Slashdot are amazing. The comment about Gnome was obviously a gentle poke at Motif, and a compliment to Gnome. Your irrational hatred of KDE/Qt is stopping you from thinking straight.
Grow up, please!
Interpretations of that event differ. But even if what you say is correct, the use of that bomb on civilians was wrong. America could have taken some of the Japanese to a demonstration of the bomb instead. The Japanese were not idiots. And even if, somehow, the first bombing could be justified, there is no way to justify Nagasaki.
In any case, many of the documents to which you refer only point out the degree to which Americas leaders went to justify their horrendous act. There were equally plausible alternatives; the generals wanted a real test of that bomb; no one can deny that.
I stated very clearly at the beginning of my original post that I despise communism; I never said that there should be mere government handouts for minorities either.
And as for the Soviets, 2 wrongs don't make a right. The lives of people in the Third World are no less precious than those of Americans; the brothers, sisters, and mothers of each of the untold thousands of victims of US global arrogance are just as bereaved as any of the comparatively very, very few American victims of terrorism by others. And American foreign policy still is based on realpolitik: the lives of other people around the world are of interest only insofar as much as they serve US foreign policy interests; so many people who have resigned in disgust from the State Dept. can tell you that.
I also said that there _is_ a difference between America and China; the Chinese are much less hypocritical. And the anti-Chinese propoganda makes the situation there appear to be worse than it is in reality.
Best
S
> Third, I do not believe that millions of African > lives were lost. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps.
This statement is as ridiculous and as unfounded as the denial of the Holocaust, perhaps more so. Slave boats frequently had a survival rate of only 10 percent (from capture to ship to market to plantation-or-whereever to work). For a given x million slaves who survived the journey (where x is greater than 3-I don't remember exactly), this translates into tens of millions who lost their lives.
Examples from the present century are endless:
the atomic bomb drop on Japan (critical historians have pointed out that Japan was going to surrender and that the drop was a test),
purposely igniting the civil war in Guatemala during the 50's (55,000 dead),
installing and vigorously propping the brutal Pinochet in Chile,
deposing Iran's democratic goverment to reinstall
the Shah and a brutal dictatorship in 1953,
supporting and funding Israel's continued brutal and underreported bombing campaign in southern Lebanon, including hospitals and schools, as well as their continued reign of terror against the Palestinians through the systematic ethnic cleansing of the occupied territories and Jerusalem,
Corporate diamond interests are behind the recent savage civil war in Sierra Leone (a diamond-rich country); when one government refuses them the concessions they want, the start a civil war,
the continued oppression of hispanics, blacks, and native americans through various not-so-subtle misallocations of government and corporate dollars
the perpetuation of underpaid and exploited underclasses in Third World countries to keep the standard of living high in the "First World"
extensive and pervasive use of prison labor by corporations to cheaply manufacture goods and provide services (this phenomenon finds America at her most hypocritical with respect to the Chinese)
As for Tiannamen Square, the US alone has instigated innumerable such instances among its puppets in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, the Phillipines, the former Iran of the Shah, Israel and Palestine, Latin America. Trust me, if there were to ever be a popular revolt here, do you really think the goverment will not use real bullets to suppress it?
At least the Chinese are honest; the West and Western capitalist do even worse things, but are more sophisticated in their use of propoganda to fool people. I wish I had more time for details and references, but other posters appear to be doing the job
I have generally remained neutral in the pro-ESR, anti-ESR debate. Reading his comments on China definitely moves me closer to the anti-ESR camp. While I despise communism, ESR's approach to the subject is nothing but pure (and yes, naive) demagoguery of the worst kind. There is not a single atrocity committed by the Chinese that has not been exceeded by corporate capitalism and the governments that more-or-less serve their interests. ESR is clearly pandering to those interests that pay his consulting fees. That's fine as long as he does not claim to speak on behalf of everyone.
I truly hope that Linux and the free software movement continue their global advance, whatever the local colorings are. In a corporate capitalist country like the USA, this movement may take on capitalist overtones; in China it may take on communist overtones; in Iran it may take on Islamic overtones. But the movement as a whole belongs to the World.
If Linux/Open Source/Free Software is too good for the PRC, then it's certainly too good for the corporate capitalist interests that ESR appears to desire to serve and please.
The point is that Red Hat claims to be using the DSFG/OpenSource guidelines. On this basis, they are being hypocritical. To be honest, they should say that they do not agree with those guidelines and that they are holding some "higher" standard. You can't have it both ways: you can't just pick and choose which DSFG-free software is really free if you adhere to the DSFG in the first place. About http://www.gnu.org/software/software.html:
"free software" is not equivalent to "GNU software": there is a lot of free software not mentioned on that page that is free and even GPL/LGPL. Besides, look closely at what that page actually says: "These are some additional Non-GPL-covered free programs which we think it is useful to mention." The list does not claim to be exhaustive.
Another point is that you cannot do "whatever you like" with GPL software. I can't sell it and keep the source to myself for example
Finally, there was some discussion between RMS and Troll Tech about the issue you hghlighted (6c), but RMS still considers Qt 2.x as free software. The bottom line is that one must be consistent in one's use of the word `free'. When you say "I can't call this free software also" you are using the word `free' in a different sense than what the Open Source/DSFG guidelines state. This is OK as long as there is one is clear about what one is doing.
I stand by my statement that Red Hat is playing the politics of division.
Best wishes to you
Samawi
From Red Hat:
>To qualify as an exclusively Free Software
>product as defined by the FSF, this four CD set >does not contain Netscape, Qt, KDE, and several
>additional non-open-source packages which are >available in other Linux products.
Note that Red Hat here does NOT distinguish Qt 1.x (old license) from Qt 2.x. Qt 2.x IS "free" according to FSF guidelines (and RMS himself) and should have been included. By being unclear and fuzzy on this issue, Red Hat is playing the usual politics of division, something I thought they had grown out of. Qt 2.x as a toolkit is independent of KDE and can be used outside of that context (just as Gtk is independent of GNOME and even of the GIMP). Red Hat knows this quite well; leaving it out is clearly an attempt to discourage the use of this particular "free software" in any context.
Some have said that this is a "hackers" distribution. Well in that case, then those interested in hacking KDE 2.0 (which uses the FSF-free Qt) could have benefitted from the inclusion of both the latest KDE sources as well as Qt! Or Red Hat could have included the sources of the present KDE official version (also DSFG-free) so that hackers could work on compiling it with Qt 2.0. Doing so would have gone some way in showing that this is not merely an anti-Qt/KDE distribution.
Note that Red Hat did not call this a "GPL-only" distribution. So one cannot claim that since Qt 2.x is non-GPL that this is the reason it was not included. This is clearly a pathetic attempt to throw a bone to all the KDE haters out there. Those who do not like KDE should also see this and not let their sentiments be played with so casually. Red Hat would have been more honest to simply call this thing a "non-KDE, non-Qt distribution" instead of falsely and shamelessly hiding behind the DFSG and RMS (who himself agrees that Qt 2.x is free!).
I used to be a big Red Hat fan. With each childish stunt like this, my opinion of them is being continuously revised downward. I hope that KDE lovers, haters, as well as neutral parties will all see through this divisive political stunt.
Anyone who owns a Qt professional edition license for Windows can compile whatever he/she wants on Windows and release it for free, even code from another developer (I read something to this effect on a posting by, if I remember correctly, a Troll Tech employee on one of the KDE lists a few months ago). If one or two developers who own such Qt professional licenses want to form a new organization, say www.freecompile.org, for free Qt-based projects on Windows, they could do so. So poor programmer X can write his/her program on X11, compile & test it, send source to developer @freecompile.org, let it get compiled and posted as freeware for Windows. This is perfectly legal as far as I know and provides the foundation for what I believe is a real solution. Surely there are at least one or two profesional Qt developers willing to contribute to this. If not, a group of, say, 25 interested freeware programmers for Windows can form freecompile.org, contribute $40 each to buy a single license for one developer (perhaps someone working on a very important OSS project as well), who will then personally compile freeware for Windows. An advantage to this scheme for Troll Tech is that they will not have to worry about someone sneaking off and selling their application; freecompile.org will keep a list of all contributions.
The above are meant to be just initial ideas. Hopefully some discussion based on this will generate a real solution. (Wouldn't that be amazing?! An actual SOLUTION to a problem generated by a Slashdot discussion!)
Rather, I think it is more likely that they want to keep up with KDE, which is about to release 1.1.2 (though some developers wanted this to be 1.2) and which is on the way to delivering on 2.0!
I submitted this story about the KDE interview. Let's see what Slashdot does (bets anyone)?.
1. Don't believe your own government's propoganda. Iran is not a terrorist country; the US has, by its own admission, sponsored far more terrorism than Iran in the last few decades (Guatemala since the fifties, Chile after 1970, Nicaragua during the eighties, even in Iran itself, and others too numerous to mention).
2. Iran is a republic which has held every single federal and local election on time since it was founded in 1979. There are more women in Iran's parliament than in the entire US congress. Iran is by all accounts a much freer country than Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other US allies in the Middle East. They do have problems like everyone else but most of the invective against them is a reaction against the Iranian people's attempt to
i) even dare try to have a political-economic system not based on European principles of secular humanism;
ii) limit Western attempts, be they cultural, economic, or ideological, to dominate Middle Eastern life in general and Muslim culture in particular.
Iran does not need anyone's patronizing or condescending approval of any so-called
"Islamic Reformation". Islam is fine just the way it is. Iran is merely going through the same kinds of growing pains the American and French revolutions went through. This talk of whether the free software movement should include Iran is really sickening and hypocritical when one considers all of the pain and suffering caused in the world by the policies of the US, Canada, and Europe over the past two centuries.
Nonanonymous posting of even more controversial ideas in response to anonymous flamebait voicing standard propoganda.
>Unfortunately, this will not be sufficient to >ensure the success of KDE. The prohibitive
>cost of licensing Qt for commercial development >ensures that most shareware and
>small proprietary software developers will write >for the Gnome desktop
This is pure (if unintentional) FUD. You do not need Qt to write KDE-compliant applications. One possible reason why FUD like this is continually spread (note that I am not saying that the author of the above post is to blame) is that there are commercial interests that want to have a QT-quality and relatively easy-to-use toolkit without having to pay for it. So they claim that Harmony is needed in order to write KDE-compliant applications.
>Hackers who prefer KDE to Gnome should strongly support the continuation of Harmony
In other words, work hard to give commercial interests a free ride. I really hope noone buys this. The interests of the free software movement are much better served by a GPL'd Harmony.