[plug] KDE licence (was Debian was Mandrake)

[Christian]

Greg Mildenhall wrote:

> 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.

The FSF definition of "Free Software" is not just GPL'd software; it
includes many other licenses such as the BSD license.  However, none of
these licenses include the restriction that the software not be
re-licensed so, as I understand it, the decision to prevent linking
software of another license with GPL is purely and simply to (attempt
to) ensure that the GNU software could not become joined with
proprietary software.  I agree with you that it is intended as a feature
and not a bug since the purpose of the license is to ensure the software
stays free, but at the same time the GPL does cause a number of
practical problems.  For example, the way the BSDs treat GNU software is
very similar to the way Debian treats non-free software: software
licensed this way is separated out and kept in a different category to
ensure that it does not "contaminate" the other software.  It is
unfortunate that there is no perfect* free software license: one which
prevents the software from becoming proprietary while being compatible
with other equivalent licenses.  Therefore we are stuck with a choice
between the GPL which may be inflexible and BSD which may result in the
software being made proprietary.  In the end it all depends on what you
want to do (and want others to do) with the software you write.

Regards,

Christian.

* "perfect" in this case being my idea of what a perfect free s/w
license would be.