[plug] KDE licence (was Debian was Mandrake)

Greg Mildenhall greg at networx.net.au
Fri Feb 25 14:36:00 WST 2000


On Wed, 23 Feb 2000, Leon Brooks wrote:
> russ wrote:
> > Is KDE illegally licensed? I thought that was all sorted?
>From my POV, it is. Richard Stallman may disagree. (-:

Have you read the GPL recently? It is pretty clear that it _does_not_ give
you permission to link to non-GPLed software.

"2.b.) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in 
whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part
thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under
the terms of this License."

This means that code licensed under the GPL cannot be redistributed except
"as a whole" and under the GPL. In KDE's case, "as a whole" means
including Qt - try running KDE without Qt sometime - and noone but
TrollTech has the right to distribute Qt under the GPL. One could argue
that TrollTech's distribution of KDE is effectively a licensing of Qt
under the GPL, but I suspect that legally, it would just not be a valid
licensing.

-Greg





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