[plug] KDE licence (was Debian was Mandrake)

[Greg Mildenhall]

On Fri, 25 Feb 2000, Trevor Phillips wrote:
> As a whole, I keep getting the impression that GPL is a pain in the butt. ^_^
> (Xenophobic to other licenses?)

Yep. But it's a feature rather than a bug. People who use the GPL don't
want to give away the spoils of their hard work for someone to take that
gift and use it towards their proprietary ends. In other words, it's fine
to use the software that has been shared with you, but share and share
alike. Richard Stallman, who wrote the GPL, regrets that it does not treat
other Free Software licenses equally, but it is simply not possible to
keep track of which licenses are free and which are not, (and which ones
might have unpleasant loopholes) so he had to restrict the definition of
Free Software to "GPLed software" for the purposes of the license.

-Greg