J.H.M. Dassen Ray" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > (We're getting into the really hypothetical here, as Troll and KDE are > working to make this discussion moot, but...)
In principle, yes. However, > If I understand you correctly, you're saying something like "Putting > KDE sources on a Debian FTP site is encouraging people to build > binaries of them and redistribute these binaries, thus encouraging > them to violate the license agreement enforced by KDE being GPLed". Yes: (1) The essence of our our package system is to make it easier for people to build and install the programs. (2) Last time I checked the kde web site, the only explicit instructions they had to the effect that kde requires Qt was an error message from ./configure if the qt library wasn't available. We make much stronger statements in our debian sources. (3) KDE doesn't appear to distribute Qt at all -- we most likely would be distributing Qt. (4) A significant number of people use our software and wouldn't install KDE if it wasn't available in our package format. > This is too far-fetched for me to take seriously. By such a line > of reasoning, putting binaries of "free for noncommerical use" > software on the non-free section of a Debian site would be encouraging > companies to use them. And, even more extreme, putting (source or > binaries of) GPL-ed libraries on a Debian site could be construed as > encouraging companies to violate the GPL on them. I'm surprised by this paragraph -- either it's very obviously wrong or I'm completely missing your point. I'll try responding based on what I understand you to be saying: Of course we're encouraging people to use the stuff we put on our sites. In most cases that's not a problem. If there are cases where that's a problem we should remove the offending packages. I'm sure you know that KDE is a problem because of the current Qt/GPL license conflict. -- Raul
