QPL != OSS and thus KDE "problem" is not solved :-))

["Khimenko Victor" <gnome khim sch57 msk ru>]

18-Nov-98 07:36 you wrote:
> This painful decision, which resulted in on-going flame wars between the
> open-source advocates and KDE enthusiasts, was halted this morning by the
> announcement of Troll Tech that their toolkit will indeed be open-source
> by EVERYONE'S definition.

Unfortunatelly QPL is not OSS ! It's Free Software, this is right, but
 1) It's not OSS.
 2) QPL is not compatible with GPL and thus KDE problem is remain in the same
    state as before: you could not distribute KDE unless Qt will be major
    component of the underlaying operation system.

How ESR itself was confused is unclear to me. If KDE copyright will be changed
to QPL then yes, KDE will be free software but for now this is bunch of files
usable on systems with Qt installed "as default". Before QPL and after QPL.
This is as simple as it is :-)

http://www.opensource.org/osd.html
-- cut --
3. Derived Works

       The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow
them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original
software.
-- cut --

http://www.troll.no/qpl/
-- cut --
3. You may make modifications to the Software. In order to preserve the
integrity of the unmodified version of the Software, modifications must be
distributed in the form of patches, and the following restrictions apply to
each patch:

     a. Application of the patch must not modify copyright notices in the
Software.

     b. The patch must be explicitly licensed by the following clauses without
additional restriction:

       Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
       copy of this patch, to deal in the patch without restriction, including
       without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
       distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the patch, subject to the
       following conditions: Any copyright notice and this permission notice
       must be included in all copies or substantial portions of the patch.

     c. The patch must include an accurate description of the modification, the
     date of the modification and the author of the modification.
-- cut --

Clear ? QPL IS NOT OSS ! And BTW it's not make KDE problem more easy :-) You
still could not distribute KDE if Qt is not default (non-optional) part of your
OS:-)) Since http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
-- cut --
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under
Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1
and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:

     a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source
        code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and
        2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

     b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years,
        to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of
        physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable
        copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the
        terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for
        software interchange; or,

     c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to
        distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed
        only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the
        program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in
        accord with Subsection b above.)

The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making
modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all
the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface
definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation
of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed
need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or
binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the
operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself
accompanies the executable.
-- cut --

P.S. May be "Open Source Software" was designed to be only marketing term but
turned out that "Free Software" and "Open Source Software" is different things.
QPL = "Free Software", but QPL != OSS :-))