[ILUG] RMS: KDE in violation of GPL

[Jimmy O'Regan]

On Wed, 6 Sep 2000, Ruairi Newman wrote:

) Hi all,
) 
) Just came across this
) (http://www.kde.org/announcements/rmsresponse.html) on Linux Today.  
) Basically the KDE camp have rejected out of hand RMS' contention that
) because the authors of code within kmidi & kghostview didn't explicitly
) give permission for their code to be linked against QT, these apps
) violate the GPL.
That's the KDE view point. What they don't mention, because they don't see
it as a problem, is that there are several KDE programs which link against
GPLd libraries, which is what RMS is talking about, I would suspect.

) 
) I don't see where he's coming from to be honest, to my mind open source
) software is reusable by whomever wants to reuse it and in whatever way
) he/she/they want to reuse it.
The GPL says that everything linked to a GPLd program must be GPLd, unless
you are linking against system libraries (eg Motif) which are *not*
distributed with your app without explicit permission from the copyright
holder. KDE didn't add this explicit permission, which is why Debian did
not include KDE, and since they didn't seek permission to link against
GPLd code which they didn't own, they violated the GPL on that software,
and forfeited any rights they had under it for that particular piece of
software. An example of this is apt (although the author added the clause
there have been enough Debian vs KDE flamewars)
) 
) Has RMS finally lost the plot?   Or is this his way of "getting his own
) back" at KDE for using QT which wasn't originally GPL'd?
If you had read his article, he granted "forgiveness" to KDE for any
use of FSF GPLd code. I don't think that would count as getting his own
back. 
) 
) Rgds,
) 
) Ruairi
) 
) 

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