[plug] Linux Support

[Peter Wright]

On Tue, Jun 27, 2000 at 05:05:16PM +0800, Darrell Horrocks wrote:
> The Thought Assassin wrote:
> > On Tue, 27 Jun 2000, Oliver White wrote:
> > > Did you hear ReiserFS was labeled 'non-free' by the debian folks?
> > Is it not GPLed? How can HR be pressing for inclusion in the mainstream
> > kernel if it is not under the GPL?
> 
> Is this the same non-free status that KDE currently enjoys in
> Debian?

KDE doesn't enjoy non-free status in Debian. KDE doesn't have any
status at all in Debian, it's just not there full stop.

Basically, KDE is GPL'ed but depends on a non LGPL'ed or GPL'ed
library which is _not_ a "system" library. The only official GPL
exception to "everything that links to this must be GPL or LGPL" is if
you're linking to a system library - ie. something that is distributed
with the system by default (that's why a lot of GPL apps written to
link with Motif were still okay on most commercial unix systems, since
most commercial unix systems had Motif installed by default).

KDE would be fine if it wasn't under GPL (if it was BSD or Artistic,
say). It would be fine if it was still under GPL but _every_ KDE
application had a license exception written in saying it was okay for
this app to be linked with the non-GPL Qt library. But that is
currently not the case for a sizable chunk of KDE, so - technically -
KDE as it stands violates the GPL.  So Debian can't support it.

> Darrell

Pete.
-- 
http://cygnus.uwa.edu.au/~pete/

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