[plug] KDE licence (was Debian was Mandrake)

[Greg Mildenhall]

On Mon, 28 Feb 2000, Christian wrote:
> Greg Mildenhall wrote:
> > 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.
It doesn't work quite like that. If the GPL said "you may link with any
DSFG-free software", you still wouldn't be able to link it with non-free
software just because the DSFG-free software you are linking to may be
linked to that. You would need to licenses of _all_ components to allow
it, so the GPLed software could not be linked to proprietary software this
way. The problem is that the DSFG is necessarily very complex and not
written in legalese like the GPL. Hence, lawyers could have a feast with
it and it would probably introduce loopholes to the GPL which cannot be
allowed to happen, even at the expense of extreme viralism. :)

> 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.
There are such licenses available for just about every definition of
"proprietary". Most people would like to find one where proprietary=DSFG
or thereabouts, but noone has hired the right lawyers to do so, so we have
to make choice between the two ends of the spectrum, in leiue of a middle
ground.

Bear in mind, of course, that the FSF doesn't really think that a "perfect
license" can exist, since licensing software requires copyrighting
software, which is roughly what they are trying to fight. (the astute
reader will notice that the realm of GPLed software is almost
indistinguishable from the software of a copyright-free world.)

-Greg