[plug] KDE licence (was Debian was Mandrake)

Greg Mildenhall greg at networx.net.au
Sun Feb 27 23:55:00 WST 2000


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 distributing the results under the GPL?
The copyright holder can do what they want with their code. Who cares? Go
back and read the preceding thread so you will understand the situation
under scrutiny. We are talking about code that the KDE team have licensed
from third parties under the GPL and since tried to distribute under a
different license - expressly forbidden by the terms under which they
recieved the code from its author/copyright holder.

> My reading of the document is that it describes what USERS can do and does 
> not constrain the copyright author.
Not even that, it only constrains what redistributors can do - you can use
it however suits you (except where it would contravene some other law).
However, we _are_ talking about redistributors of code here, not the
authors.

-Greg




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