Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2001 17:34:32 -0800 From: David Johnson <djohnson@acuson.com> To: Anthony Atkielski <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com> Cc: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Prevalence of FreeBSD and UNIX among servers Message-ID: <3C0D79A8.CD79EB34@acuson.com> References: <00ef01c17cda$6b419760$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <3C0D0426.BEC515D7@dnr.state.ak.us> <010001c17cf4$954228d0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <3C0D21CD.7F89C40A@dnr.state.ak.us> <013b01c17d10$cf9c99e0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <3C0D591E.D33C5BD5@dnr.state.ak.us> <018701c17d25$16c389a0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <3C0D7177.542DD45B@acuson.com> <019a01c17d2a$067fc5e0$0a00000a@atkielski.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Anthony Atkielski wrote: > > David writes: > > > ... to merely posting a white paper saying > > that KDE is illegal (the latter caused me to > > eventually switch to FreeBSD). > > KDE is illegal? Says who? Said Redhat in a white paper posted on their website that helped spark the whole "KDE is Illegal" holy war. The gist of their argument was that Qt was not GPL compatible, KDE was under the GPL, so that the KDE license (GPL) was invalid and thus could not be legally distributed. Other minor points in the paper cited kfloppy and kghostview which took existing GPL software and dynamically linked them at runtime to non-GPL Qt. At the time this white paper was published, Redhat had just announced that they were financially supporting GNOME. A week after Redhat once again included KDE in their distribution, I noticed that particular white paper was STILL posted on their website. So I asked them if they now considered Redhat to be in violation of the law, and that white paper disappeared from public access within twenty four hours. Just about everyone now agrees that KDE is fully legal since Qt is not dual licensed QPL/GPL. However there are still some holdouts (mainly from Debian) who maintain that KDE developers still need formal forgiveness from Linus Torvalds (for kfloppy) and Aladdin (for kghostview) before they are allowed to distribute it legally. Formal forgiveness from RMS was already provided for any FSF code that might have been used in KDE (none ever was). All in all a sorry chapter in Free Software history. David To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?3C0D79A8.CD79EB34>