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Posts about kde (old posts, page 2)

Advogato post for 2000-09-06 13:21:54

Joey, if Debian includes KDE now, I will be happy to apologize. BTW: Debian can just get a copy, you are excepted by section 4, which RMS told me is the one about forfeiting rights. You will be in compliance, and you can keep on redistributing it, so Debian still has no excuse. Go ahead, MAKE ME APOLOGIZE, that's what I want most than anything.

Tla­d­u­ca: what you see here is just rage and frus­tra­tion. Be­cause that's about all I have left in me re­gard­ing RM­S, the FS­F, etc. If it both­ers you, too bad, re­al­ly. I'm gonna keep on cod­ing, but I now know that what­ev­er we do we will nev­er get the re­spect of the FS­F, or RM­S, be­cause they seem to just dis­like us for pol­i­tic­s, be­cause I refuse to be­lieve this hack­neyed for­give­ness thing is se­ri­ous, since it's triv­ial to fix (even if you take the most hard­core po­si­tion on it). Too bad for them. I don't care any­more.

And af­ter al­l, if RMS re­al­ly be­lieved this about for­fei­ture, would­n't he have said that in one of his pre­vi­ous state­ments about the sub­jec­t? That's why I be­lieve he is just mak­ing it up as he goes.

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.

Advogato post for 2000-09-05 17:46:55

To those saying "oh, no, Debian was just waiting for the licensing problems to clear up", read and cry:

http://list­s.de­bian.org/de­bian-de­vel-0009/ms­g00270.html

--------------

> > I guess RevKrusty may want to put his pack­ages in­to De­bian?
>
> He al­ready up­load­ed kdelib­s, I did­n't see if it was in­stalled.

I was won­der­ing what hap­pened to it? It did­n't ap­pear in the archives, it was­n't moved to RE­JECT or DONE, it just dis­ap­peared. I was won­der­ing if there was some long flame war on de­bian-pri­vate that I was miss­ing.

--------------

More of the same old crap. Rea­sons why you should nev­er trust your code to politi­cian­s.

Edi­tion: For hon­esty's sake, I will not delete what I had writ­ten. How­ev­er, it seems the pack­ages are still in in­com­ing. Le's wait and see. Now that RMS has giv­en De­bian yet an­oth­er straw to grasp with the for­give­ness stuff, I have no hopes of KDE get­ting in­to De­bian, though.

Advogato post for 2000-08-16 18:23:31

Oh, joy, I'm coding :-) I'm doing a bunch of things, trying to decide on a largish project to tackle (that is not as scary as porting KRN to KDE2).

One of the things is a KDE style, I call Note, al­though it could be called flat.

Al­so, I'm try­ing to look at Qt de­sign­er, with some trou­ble, be­cause there is some­thing in one of the source files that to­tal­ly drives gcc in­sane, mak­ing it eat a bazil­lion megabytes of RAM.

The gen­er­at­ed XML files are very read­able. I am cu­ri­ous whether there is sup­port for run­time load­ing of them. I used to use that with Kde­vel­op's di­a­log ed­i­tor in­stead of the code gen­er­a­tion route, and it's much cool­er.

Advogato post for 2000-08-09 19:58:29

Ok, so there goes the idea of speedy reporting ;-)

I did present my thing af­ter the pre­vi­ous post, and I did it in front of a whole lot of peo­ple. It went well, even if a bit faster than I ex­pect­ed. The Q&A part was nice, and on­ly one ques­tion con­tained the word li­cense ;-)

Lat­er that same day, RMS gave his speech in the same place (yes, he had a big­ger au­di­ence ;-). It was his usu­al speech, ba­si­cal­ly the same thing you can read in the FS­F's web page.

Some nugget­s: "we cre­at­ed GNOME be­cause of the ter­ri­ble threat of KDE". There you have it GNOME guys and gal­s, you on­ly ex­ist be­cause of us, and to you GNOME fan­s, you can now con­sid­er GNOME a side ef­fect of KDE, be thank­ful and stop bick­er­ing ;-)

He did say KDE is il­le­gal, and I de­cid­ed NOT to ask him when had he be­come a lawyer and/or judge. He did­n't men­tion his lates "im­plic­it per­mis­sion is given" po­si­tion, ei­ther.

How­ev­er, af­ter fi­nal­ly se­ing him in per­son, I can un­der­stand why he has such ra­bid fan­s. He is kin­da in­spi­ra­tional. As long as you are un­der 25. I would con­sid­er any­one old­er that that, who still swal­lows it as un­crit­i­cal­ly as most of the au­di­ence did, im­ma­ture.

And yes, he did say that you can al­ways go flip burg­ers and code in your (ob­vi­ous­ly co­pi­ous) free time.

And yes, he did say that an­oth­er al­ter­na­tive is to work de­vel­op­ing cus­tom soft­ware, which is "90% of the soft­ware in­dus­try", and that would not be un­eth­i­cal.

I have a VERY big prob­lem with that ar­gu­men­t, which I should some day write down care­ful­ly.

The ba­sics are that the cus­tom soft­ware writ­ten for, say, a aero­space com­pa­ny would be just as use­ful for an­oth­er. In fac­t, it's that soft­ware's EX­TREME use­ful­ness to oth­er com­pa­nies what keeps the soft­ware closed.

Con­sid­er that it's so use­ful that a com­pa­ny is will­ing to pay for the en­tire de­vel­op­men­t!

And if that soft­ware would be use­ful for "the neigh­bour", then that soft­ware's li­cense presents the same eth­i­cal im­per­a­tives as any oth­er. You, de­vel­op­er of cus­tom soft­ware, are cre­at­ing soft­ware that is use­ful for "the neigh­bour", giv­ing it to oth­er­s, and for­bid­ding those oth­ers help "the neigh­bour" (or at least you are do­ing just the same as if you were a Word de­vel­op­er).

Now, I don't be­lieve free soft­ware de­vel­op­ment is eth­i­cal­ly su­pe­ri­or to pro­pri­etary soft­ware de­vel­op­men­t, but RMS does.

And since he does, he ei­ther has not no­ticed this, or he has two in­com­pat­i­ble po­si­tion­s. Your pick.

Or, of course, I'm to­tal­ly wrong. But I'd like some rea­sons why, if you be­lieve that. A good one would be "here is a way in which de­vel­op­ing pro­pri­etary cus­tom soft­ware for a com­pa­ny is dif­fer­ent from de­vel­op­ing pro­pri­etary soft­ware for user­s".

Lat­er that night, we had our speak­er­s' and or­ga­niz­er­s' din­ner.... where there were about 50 who were not any of those things.

That din­ner kin­da sucked, in the food sense, but the or­ga­ni­za­tion of the whole thing was just too good for one bad menu choice (rice & chick­en) to be con­sid­ered :-)

Then (con­sid­er­ably amount of beer in me) I went to the hotel, and over­slept next morn­ing, miss­ing Julio San­ta Cruz's stuff (sor­ry julio), saw an­oth­er one I can't re­cal­l, said good­bye to ev­ery­one, missed RM­S's sec­ond speech (if I had seen it, I would have ar­rived home way too late), and left.

All in al­l, fun, in­for­ma­tive, some good stuff to be seen, saw a lot of peo­ple I had on­ly known by email, and a lot of peo­ple I had not seen in a long while and missed (the guys from UNER, UTN and UN­L!).

I got WAY too tired from this, so I came to work in a zom­bie fash­ion on mon­day, closed a course, and stayed home yes­ter­day... and that's pret­ty much it :-)


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