[plug] KDE licence (was Debian was Mandrake)

[Beau Kuiper]

On Sun, 27 Feb 2000, John Summerfield wrote:
> > On Sat, 26 Feb 2000, russ 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.
> 
> What in the GPL prevents an author (copyright holder) from linking with 
> any library at all and distributng the results under the GPL?
> 
> My reading of the document is that it describes what USERS can do and does 
> not constrain the copyright author.

I agree, People seem to forget that the licence the author gives to users
doesn't actually apply to the author! :-)

Anyway, this KDE license disccusion is so bland, and pointless, because even if
the above were true, KDE developers will not come after you for linking their
programs with the library it was clearly designed for! Doing so would be
disaster for their project and image. I would seriously doubt such a case would
even hold up in court!

Flaming away :-P
Beau Kuiper
ekuiperba at cc.curtin.edu.au