[techtalk] KDE / OpenSource

kelly at poverty.bloomington.in.us kelly at poverty.bloomington.in.us
Mon Aug 7 05:33:03 EST 2000


On Thu, 3 Aug 2000 19:01:01 +0200, Patricia Jung <trish at trish.de> said:

>Of course not -- but as soon as you take GPLed code from KDE and
>include it in your code, you agree with that it is OK that KDE is
>GPLed and that there is no licencing problem.  

KDE can release its code under any license it chooses, including the
GPL, without violating the law.  The problem with Qt comes when you
talk about the binaries.  Source code is source code and can be
distributed even if it doesn't work at all.  But when you link a GPL
program against some other library (other than a "major component" of
the operating system), the resulting executable can only be
distributed if every library to which it was linked is distributed
under a license which grants the recipient of each copy of that
license at least the same rights with respect to the source of that
library as that recipient would have received had the library been
licensed under the GPL.  This inclusionary rule ONLY APPLIES to the
distribution of executables.

So, if you obtain a copy of KDE source under the GPL, that license is
good and valid.  However, it is quite probably true that KDE
_executables_ are undistributable because they include Qt (or at least 
Qt runtime linkages, which are probably enough to violate the GPL)
code.

KDE's choice of license is ill-considered, not because it prevents
them from distributing their source, but because it prevents them from 
distributing their executables.

Kelly





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