[plug] KDE licence (was Debian was Mandrake)

[Greg Mildenhall]

On Sun, 27 Feb 2000, Beau Kuiper wrote:
> On Sun, 27 Feb 2000, John Summerfield wrote:
> > 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! :-)
No, I don't think anyone has forgotten. John just didn't read things
carefully enough and thought we were discussing code for which the KDE
team held copyright. The code we were discussing is that which the KDE
team have licensed under the GPL from third parties.

> 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!
No, but the third parties might very well go after the KDE team and anyone
else who distributes KDE, since they have not given KDE permission to
distribute modified versions of their code linked to Qt.

Also, since Troll Tech (copyright holders for Qt) do distribute KDE, it is
arguable that someone could demand their right to license Qt under the GPL
from Troll Tech as part of Troll's licensing of KDE to them. That person
could then begin a GPLed fork of Qt, which would be far more convenient
for the Free Software users of Qt, and lead to a better product more
widely ported, thus starving Troll of market share in the Free Software
world, and vastly limiting their leverage to sell Qt under a non-Free
license to the commercial world. (Troll's main source of revenue.)

-Greg