Advogato post for 2000-09-08 14:26:29
Ok, enough abou that. I am done reading "a man in full" and am half through "the right stuff", and I now wonder if Wolfe has used "let his ego out for a romp like a red dog" in any of his other books.
Ok, enough abou that. I am done reading "a man in full" and am half through "the right stuff", and I now wonder if Wolfe has used "let his ego out for a romp like a red dog" in any of his other books.
a) Nautilus ain't Galeon. And you missed the part about GNOME actually stealing (for a while only) KDE code. And that code is still used, and no forgiveness has been asked, that I know of. Should GNOME be now "illegal"? Again, I say no. If you agree, don't argue with me.
b) The apologize and forgive I do is honest. Really. I have said nasty things about Debian. I will apologize , for whatever that's worth, and I will forgive Debian for calling me a criminal, when I believe that was totally unwarranted. Again, for whatever that's worth.
If you feel strongly about that, well, see if I care.
sh It's nowhere as simple as "it links" or "it doesn't link", actually. You see, the GPL, in its fuzziness, doesn't say anything about linking. It just speaks about "the larger work" that combines the two works, the GPL'd and the not GPL'd. The mechanisms for combining are not in the license, and are debatable.
For example, I have always said that dynamic linking is not combining in the sense the GPL deals with.
Think about it: what difference is, from a practical point of view, between a bonobo component and a shared library? Only that there is a different way to call the functions, and that (not sure here) both pieces of code reside on different address spaces.
Just changing the convention for function calling, I have never seen described as a way to work around the GPL, and I doubt you want it to be.
As for being in separate address spaces, I remember RMS once saying that as long as things were like that, it was not "combining". Ok, but surely you don't want to say the opposite, that by being in the same address space it IS combining, because in that case, you get in a hell of a mess with any environment that doesn't support memory protection!
If you do, all GPL software would be illegal on, say, windows 3.11, and I know for a fact that the FSF doesn't believe that to be true.
So, the fine point is: what is "combining in the sense used in the GPL", and none of us has a straight answer, not me, not you, and probably not RMS, either.
This is yet another reason why the GPL is a mess.
I still say "I'll believe it when I see it", but at least I have SOME hopes of seing it.
I steel feel Debian has, in general, acted wrong in the past, but I will apologize and forgive. When the code is in, of course.
I wonder if this means that RMS will declare Debian to be non-free software, though.
Two more random license questions:
a) if KDE code was not properly licensed, then it was not licensed. If it was not licensed, noone could use it. If noone could use it, noone could derive from it. If noone could derive, gtkhtml is illegal, and GNOME should be dumped from Debian. And GNOME should ask forgiveness?
b) Nautilus (and other GNOME programs) are GPL and link (optionally) to mozilla. Mozilla is still not compatible with the GPL. Shouldn't those programs be declared "not properly licensed" by Debian, too?
My answers: no and no. But neither should KDE have had to take as much crap when others are allowed to get away with it.
brother: It's not a matter of black helicopters, at all. It's a matter of having a package (kdelibs) that Debian already said has no licensing problems, and still it never gets into Debian, after many many months. Why should I believe KDE will change their minds? After all, again, it was not licensing that kept kdelibs out! In fact, I still have not seen any rational explanation on why kdelibs was removed in the first place, except that they were wrong about the license of something in it (gettext). They were wrong. They knew it. Did they put it back? Of course not.
Besides, didn't knew that posting something in my diary was yelling ;-)
nymia: Odds of what? Odds of having fun coding? Probably. Odds of finding people to use the code? I doubt it. Odds of being sued? There are none whatsoever. The solution is so trivial (and described below) that it makes no sense to even whine.
Believe it or not, I am now totally relaxed. Since I don't give a damn about the whole bunch anymore, they can do whatever they want, including sueing me, if they really want to. They are dead to me.
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.