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Advogato post for 2000-09-05 20:31:43

Ok, I swear this is my last entry of today.

So that peo­ple can un­der­stand why RMS piss­es me off so much: for YEARS he has been say­ing that the prob­lem with KDE was that the QPL and the GPL were in­com­pat­i­ble, and that if they were not in­com­pat­i­ble, there would be no prob­lem.

That is al­so what De­bian has been say­ing (and say­ing, and say­ing, and...).

And now that Qt is GPL, lo and be­hold, "o­h, yeah, KDE is still il­le­gal".

Long ago, I saw some­one write: "They will not be hap­py un­til Qt is GPL". Well not even then, it seem­s.

BTW: I got one re­ply telling me where the GPL says about for­feit­ing right­s.

Sec­tion 4:

4. You may not copy, mod­i­fy, sub­li­cense, or dis­trib­ute the Pro­gram ex­cept as ex­press­ly pro­vid­ed un­der this Li­cense. Any at­tempt oth­er­wise to copy, mod­i­fy, sub­li­cense or dis­trib­ute the Pro­gram is void, and will au­to­mat­i­cal­ly ter­mi­nate your rights un­der this Li­cense. How­ev­er, par­ties who have re­ceived copies, or right­s, from you un­der this Li­cense will not have their li­cens­es ter­mi­nat­ed so long as such par­ties re­main in full com­pli­ance.

Just so you see how stupid this is:

This would mean that if I com­bined Qt and GPL code from the FS­F, and give it to Joe (ex­am­ple per­son­), then it's il­le­gal for me to use and dis­trib­ute that code from now on. But not for Joe, be­cause now Joe is in com­pli­ance and ex­cept­ed!

Then, I must ask Joe to give me a copy. Now, be­cause of the GPL's sec­tion 6, I now have a le­gal li­cense to keep on cod­ing:

6. Each time you re­dis­tribute the Pro­gram (or any work based on the Pro­gram), the re­cip­i­ent au­to­mat­i­cal­ly re­ceives a li­cense from the orig­i­nal li­cen­sor to copy, dis­trib­ute or mod­i­fy the Pro­gram sub­ject to these terms and con­di­tion­s. You may not im­pose any fur­ther re­stric­tions on the re­cip­i­ents' ex­er­cise of the rights grant­ed here­in. You are not re­spon­si­ble for en­forc­ing com­pli­ance by third par­ties to this Li­cense.

Now, does it mean I have to find some­one who has nev­er used KDE, give him a copy of the CVS tree and the ar­gu­ment is void? Yes. This is one of the rea­sons why the GPL is BAD­LY WRIT­TEN.


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