Re: KDE vs. Gnome?

["Brian F. Kimball" <bfk footbag org>]

On Wed, Jun 28, 2000 at 08:24:32AM -0400, Poletti, Don wrote:

> > On Thu, Jun 22, 2000 at 08:12:31AM -0400, Poletti, Don wrote:
> >  
> > > The GTK widget set that gnome is based on is NOT GPLed its
> > > LGPL. That is the Library General public license.
> > 
> > s/Library/Lesser/
> 
> I'll have to check but I thought they change it from lesser to
> library.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/licence-list.html
 
> Question: If I buy a GPL piece of software is it licenced? Can I install
> it on more than one machine?

"If I buy a licensed piece of software is it licensed?"  ????

Do you mean with an end user license agreement?  No, as I said before,
the GPL is not an EULA.

And are you really not sure if the definitive free software license
allows you to copy software licensed under it to other machines?

> > 	"Activities other than copying, distribution and modification
> > 	are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope.
> > 	The act of running the Program is not restricted, 
> 
> Could you translate this to english. for instance "running the program is 
> not restricted." Does this mean the GPL does not restrict addition licence
> restriction on the program.

No, it means the act of running the Program is not restricted.  That
says nothing about adding additional restrictions to the license.

> Or the opposite that you can't add additional
> restrictions.

This is stated in section 6 of the GPL.

> Basically can I say one licence per machine is required.

I don't understand this.  Can you elaborate on what are you trying to
accomplish, and why?

> > > KDE on the other hand is released QPL.
> > 
> > No, the toolkit (Qt) used by KDE applications is QPL.  The 
> > KDE libraries
> > are mostly LGPL and the licenses for the applications vary.
> 
> You can't write a KDE app without the toolkit so you are 
> bound by it. But otherwise you are correct.

Being bound by a copyright license and being licensed under it are two
different things.  An application that is linked to Qt must have a
copyright license that meets the requirements in section 6 of the QPL.
By no means does it need to be licensed under the QPL, however.

http://www.trolltech.com/products/download/freelicense/license.html

> > > These means its free [...]
> > 
> > Beware, portions of KDE cannot be distributed legally.  The QPL is not
> > compatible with the GPL, under which some KDE applications 
> > are licensed.
> 
> Yep funny how the open source community can ignore things they 
> don't like. The FSF should really sue the KDE people

The FSF has no say in the matter.  There is no FSF-copyrighted code in
KDE (AFAIK).

-- 
                                      Brian F. Kimball <bfk@footbag.org>

What foods these morsels be!