> From: "Andrew Wansink" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > I am also not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be sued > by anyone so I don't care too much for licenses. I believe that a qt > port of abiword is within the 'spirit' of the gnu license.
This isn't an uncommon feeling among open source developers, and certainly among users. IMO, it's pretty reasonable if you're writing something to scratch your own personal itch. However, Mr. Wansink should be aware that such license incompatibility can make it difficult for others to contribute to the program or to distribute the program. On the other hand, as long as there's a version available that does NOT link against the qt libraries, then that version is usable by anyone, and the kde license restrictions (or the GPL restrictions, depending on your viewpoint) hurt only the kde port. On the gripping hand, if the owner of the copyright for abiword (which may not be a well-defined entity if significant contributions have been made by multiple people under GPL) chooses to link against restricted libs, that's fine and dandy, as permission to do so is granted, by definition, to oneself. This hybrid can't go in Debian (unless its released under a different license than GPL), but nobody has broken any laws. -- Mark Rafn [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://www.halcyon.com/dagon/> !G
