[plug] KDE licence (was Debian was Mandrake)

[russ]

Greg Mildenhall wrote:
> > BTW, they have a specific section on QT which explicitly says you can
> > link QT into a GPL program of your own:
> It doesn't matter what the Qt license says, it is the GPL that says you
> can't. You need permission from both licensers. If you wrote the GPL code,
> then you can just license it under a modified GPL which allows linking to
> Qt. (as sugested by the GNU page you quoted) Unfortunately for the KDE
> team, they don't own the code and licensed it under an unmodified GPL.

That quote came form the GNU homepage, not QT. GNU has a special
section on the QT license that says you can link in QT.

"The Qt Public License (QPL). 

This is a non-copyleft free software license which is incompatible
with the GNU GPL. It also causes major practical inconvenience,
because modified sources can only be distributed as patches. 

We recommend that you use QPL-covered software packages only when
absolutely necessary, and certainly don't use the QPL for anything
that you write. 

Since the QPL is incompatible with the GNU GPL, you cannot take a
GPL-covered program and Qt and link them together, no matter how. 

However, if you have written a program that uses Qt, and you want to
release your program under the GNU GPL, you can easily do that. You
can resolve the conflict for your program by adding a notice like this
to it: 

      As a special exception, you have permission to link this program
      with the Qt library and distribute executables, as long as you
      follow the requirements of the GNU GPL in regard to all of the
      software in the executable aside from Qt.

You can do this, legally, if you are the copyright holder for the
program. Add it in the source files, after the notice that says the
program is covered by the GNU GPL."