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.

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

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> > 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.

Ok, I am now sure of several things:

a) If you whine loud enough, you will get what you wan­t.

b) RMS is mak­ing up his in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the GPL as he goes

c) De­bian will still not ship KDE, be­cause now they be­lieve RM­S's strange idea that we need "for­give­ness". Ad­di­tion: I asked RMS where specif­i­cal­ly in the GPL it says any­thing about for­feit­ing right­s. Be­cause I sure can't find it :-P

All in al­l, a crap­py day for free soft­ware.

Just noticed that I said in the previous entry that the river world tetralogy was written by J.G. Ballrd.... yikes.

First, it's writ­ten by Philip Jose Farmer (and should have re­mem­bered be­cause he has an al­ter egp called Pe­ter Jairus Frigate, and the ini­tials would­n't match with J.G. Bal­lard ;-)

Al­so, strange­ly it's not a tetral­o­gy, be­cause I found a 5th vol­ume ;-)

Any­way, read the 5th vol­ume, fin­ished the patag­o­ni­an ex­press (I re­al­ly like the book, strange­ly, the train shown in the cov­er is one that is NOT in the book!) and start­ed Tom Wolfe's "A man in ful­l".

I must say I can't read Or­son Scott Card. maybe it's just a lousy book (xeno­cide), but it's un­read­able.

I am do­ing SOME cod­ing, too ;-)

First, I am curious, why is advogato now on advogato.alancoxonachip.com, and why is it asking me for renewed authentication?

Any­way, it's not as if any­one cares what I put here, so I care not about se­cu­ri­ty ;-)

You know, I now have de­cid­ed there is a good side to 45 min­utes com­mutes. I can read a lot more!

This is what I have read in the last two weeks or so:

• Han­ni­bal
• The drum's skin (Nice nov­el by Ar­turo Pérez-Re­verte)
• 3 pieces of JG Bal­lard's riv­er world tetral­o­gy (I can't find the third piece) Re­al­ly nice!
• the 6th piece of Ben­ford's ga­lac­tic cen­ter hex­al­o­gy Crap!
• One book by Ann Rice. I can't even re­mem­ber the name, and hon­est­ly they all melt in mem­o­ry... this is the one where the an­cient egyp­cian queen comes awakes. I don't think I will ev­er read an­oth­er one of these.

And now I'm start­ing Paul Th­er­oux's "The patag­o­ni­an ex­press", which is, so far, aw­ful­ly good. "'This is like the tran­s-si­beri­an', he said. 'No it is­n't', I replied" is a seem­ing­ly stupid line that I can't get out of my head.

Not to men­tion:

"I had ca­su­al­ly men­tioned to her that I had been to Up­per bur­ma and Africa. I had de­scribed Leopold Bloom's love of 'the faint tang of urine'in the kid­neys he had for break­fast. I had shown a knowl­edge of the Bud­dhism and the eat­ing habits of Bush­men in the kala­hari and Gand­hi's ear­ly mar­ried life. I was a fair­ly in­ter­est­ing per­son, was I not? But not once in the en­tire con­ver­sa­tion had she asked me a sin­gle ques­tion."

Now, Paul Th­er­oux re­al­ly sounds like a pre­ten­tious bore, but it's still fun, so as far as I am con­cerned, he should keep on be­ing one ;-)