On Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 10:38:12AM -0800, LinuxRocks! wrote:
> > IMO Richard Stallman is dangerous. He does easily as much harm as good to
> > the community that supposedly doesn't exist. We're talking about the guy
> > that pretty much singlehandedly made the KDE license war last an extra two
> > years because he insisted on GPL or nothing. At the time, I asked the
> > people at Troll Tech what was wrong with the GPL. Their response was
> > three letters: RMS. There's such a thing as going to far, and he'd gone
> > it. I saw the email and what Richard was doing. It was designed to piss
> > them off and coerce them into the GPL. The more he pushed, the more they
> > pushed back. Only after he stopped pushing and let tempers settle for a
> > couple of years was it possible to speak reasonably about the topic.
> did he try to change kde to gplde ?
He told Troll Tech that if they did not GPL Qt (they did a few years
later), they were responsible for KDE's license problem. At the time,
Qt's license was decidedly non-free, and TT was trying to write a free
license for the library. I was helping them do it. The license I was
writing was GPL-compatible. Richard insisted that there was no such thing
as a GPL-compatible license other than the LGPL. Someone asked about the
X11 license, and he swore mixing X11 and GPL code was illegal. It was GPL
or bust, in his opinion.
When I saw these messages, I only commented that I had no idea what he was
smoking. Mattias suggested that this was not a useful question because if
we asked him to share the license would never get finished. In the end,
the license TT used was less ideal than what I was working on IMO because
they wanted to spite Richard.
--
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act,
but a habit."
-- Aristotle
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