Freedom of Software protected by GPL -- not BSD!

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Freedom of Software protected by GPL -- not BSD!
by Kurt Pfeifle on Saturday 03/Jan/2004, @06:26

>> True freedom is Apache, BSD, X, MIT etc (and is some
>> metrics LGPL) because I am "FREE" to choose the license
>> of my opinion for my work without asking or sponsoring
>> anyone

Mr. Velev,

we have a very differeent point of view here.

You are in effect saying that true freedom is if you can ask to receive a gun as a gift from anyone and are free to choose the terms of its usage on your own, even to point it at the donator, solely at your own will and if you like.

No-no-no, Mr. Velev! True freedom can only persist if it is protected. The GPL guarantees that all derived works remain under the GPL, thus: remain Free and remain under GPL protection.

As you very well know, the BSD license doesn't guarantee that all derived works remain under a Free license. You even acknowledge that indirectly because you are asking for a change of our prefered license: you insist on getting something from us which you want to receive without any exchange value.

In fact, you do it even receive for free *now*. KDE is for you today "without any exchange value" for your personal use. But you keep asking for more... Therefor you are what I'd like to call a truly unmodest and barefaced guy.

Yes, the KDE project has chosen the GPL license for many parts of its "product". KDE wants to be "sponsored" by those who use our work and build their own work on top of ours. We do admit to this...

After all, KDE generously plays an "in advance" sponsoring role in the first place: you are free to use KDE without payment, without saying Thankyou and without asking us at all. Only if you try to build your own product (commercial or not, gratis or not) on top of KDE source code, only if you want to found your own personal fame or create cash profit by writing software of your own which you want to distribute. -- only then we want "something back": the source code of your derived work. We think this is a very reasonable and very modest expectation.... Do you forget that this source code would contain *our* source code to a large part?

And this our claim you dare to call unreasonable?

I find your continuous demand, after providing you with an initial gift, to now provide you with an even larger gift which you are free to use against us... well, really impertinent!

Since we, the KDE contributors are the creators of our product, please leave us our freedom to decide about our licensing terms.

We do leave *you* the freedom to use a different license yourself, and to derive your own work from the work of developers who choose BSD, X or MIT licenses. We respect your decision. Please do also respect ours.

In the meantime, have fun to use KDE, make any profit you like by using KDE -- but give us the sources back if you use our world-class quality sources to create a derived product of yours!.

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Re: Freedom of Software protected by GPL -- not BS
by Anton Velev on Saturday 03/Jan/2004, @07:43

Ok, just don't speculate with the word 'FREEDOM' because
"enforced freedom is not freedom"
and freedom is something more than that, and is more like:
- freedom of choice
- free market
- free speach
- freedom to innovate
and i will something from myself:
- freedom from GPL

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Re: Freedom of Software protected by GPL -- not BS
by Datschge on Saturday 03/Jan/2004, @07:58

Mr. Velve, the GPL is not about the freedom to take (like BSD) but the freedom to give. The concerned audience is not the one you are representing by asking and begging for specific features, but the audience which actually gives away their own work for free, that is programmers and other kind of contributors. Those have no interest whatsoever in others having the freedom to take away their work for free, instead they are concerned to see their work to stay free. This is exactly what the GPL does. You are clearly wasting your time here.

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Re: Freedom of Software protected by GPL -- not BS
by Kurt Pfeifle on Saturday 03/Jan/2004, @08:16

>>GPL is not about the freedom to take (like BSD) but the freedom to give

I would modify that sentence to read like this:

GPL is not about the freedom to only "take" (like BSD), but the freedom to "give and take"

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Re: Freedom of Software protected by GPL -- not BS
by Datschge on Saturday 03/Jan/2004, @22:50

I chose "give" since GPL is strictly a source distribution enforcement license.

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Re: Freedom of Software protected by GPL -- not BS
by Kurt Pfeifle on Sunday 04/Jan/2004, @02:20

OK -- I can see your point

My "give and take" is meant to express that the GPL is more "balanced", in that it asks, in a way, for a return from the receiver of Free Software, should he more than just use it (re-distribute modified or un-modified).

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Re: Freedom of Software protected by GPL -- not BS
by Ray on Friday 09/Jan/2004, @09:31

>Mr. Velve, the GPL is not about the freedom to take (like BSD) but the freedom to give. ... they are concerned to see their work to stay free.

Sorry, the GPL is not just about seeing the existing work stay free. That's an acceptable summary for the LGPL, AFSL 2.0, and quite a number of other open source licenses. If all you are concerned about is preventing open source software from being usurped, then there are plenty of licenses beside the GPL that will achieve this goal.

The GPL is about taking and increasing the amount of software bound by the GPL. This is exactly what the GPL does. Merely linking to a GPL'ed lib makes your entire application GPL'ed. Please read the GPL FAQ: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL

You may like the viral aspects of the GPL. That's fine. Other's don't and for many of them, it is indeed a problem. But please, don't cast the GPL as just protecting open source and definitely don't portray it as the only viable option.

>You are clearly wasting your time here.

If you are chosing to ignore the reality of the GPL, or intentionally misrepresenting the GPL so it can infect other code, or actually feel that the work of others somehow automagically belongs to everybody, simply because they link to a GPL'ed library, then yes indeed he is wasting his time.

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Re: Freedom of Software protected by GPL -- not BS
by Mike on Thursday 11/Mar/2004, @02:03

From a philosophical perspective all software functionality will eventually become "free". GPL is merely a catalyst for the inevitable. 1-1=1

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Re: Freedom of Software protected by GPL -- not BS
by Kurt Pfeifle on Saturday 03/Jan/2004, @08:35

Mr. Velev,

I clearly don't want to share the your kind of freedom: you are putting a lot of different things into the same bag and tell me that they belong together.

I am all for "freedom of choice". But I also am aware: any "freedom of choice" in our type of society and environments must have also "limits".

If you'd use your "freedom of choice" to do me harm, I will fight back. I assure you, that wouldn't be pleasant for you nor for me, nor for the rest of us.

That's why sane people voluntarily restrict themselves to not use freedom of choice to their own personal gusto and advantage alone. I am sure you are one of these sane people... ;-)

But not all are nice as you. There are not just sane guys and gals on this evil world. That's where rules and law and law enforcement comes into play. And the bending of rules and laws And power and even dictatorship.

We choose to use some rules under which our software may be used, and ask users to agree to these rules. These rules are *very* liberal. These rules even include a big degree of "freedom of choice", "free market", "free speech", "freedom to innnovate", believe it or not.

Your "freedom from GPL" would stop protecting the above freedoms. Your "freedom from GPL" denies my freedom to choose the GPL.

Your are wasting your time. And mine. I, for my part, will now stop wasting time.

Have a nice time with using KDE on Linux, *BSD, *nix or Mac OS X!

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Re: Freedom of Software protected by GPL -- not BS
by Dude on Saturday 03/Jan/2004, @12:18

Judging from your posts. Your "true freedom" seems like anarchism to me.

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Re: Freedom of Software protected by GPL -- not BS
by ghostdoguk on Saturday 24/Jan/2004, @16:47

Freedom errrm. Speach is not speech. I get pissed off with the inability of the new world to speak english. Please -- doesn't KDE have a spell checker ?
I use Macos X. I love KDE.
sorry

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Re: Freedom of Software protected by GPL -- not BSD!
by OK on Saturday 03/Jan/2004, @12:12

> The GPL guarantees
Well, basically it guarantees that people don't behave like scumbags.
If you want to feed upon thousands of other peoples sweat, why not give them _something_ back? Of course, Novell/Sun/Whatever do not want to give. Basically, they are driven by the greed of their stock owners, which in many circumstances is good, and generates jobs etc, but now...well.

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Re: Freedom of Software protected by GPL -- not BSD!
by Iuri Fiedoruk on Saturday 03/Jan/2004, @14:03

I could (and didn't had patience) for saying it better.

Basically Trolltech have the freedom to choose the license they want for QT, and KDE have the freedom to choose the toolkit they wish, and we have te freedom to develop using libs, toolkits and plataform we like most.

Saying that KDE *must* change it's license because someone dosen't like how it works, is simply saying that KDE or Trolltech or me or you dosen't have the right to choose a license that they/we belive is better, what is cutting or freedom of choise.

I choise GPL for all my free/non-commercial software because I like the fact that no one can use or fork my code without releasing the code ahead.

So, let's live with the Trolltech and KDE team choises and respect their desision. If you don't like this, please, go ahead and use something else.

And about companies not using QT/KDE that not what I'm seeing, see The Kompany, IBM and Adobe examples. Yes, Sun and others are choising Gnome over KDE, but that's their choise that I respect, as I respect the users that get those systems and install KDE on it (see solaris example),

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Re: Freedom of Software protected by GPL -- not BSD!
by Ingo Kl�cker on Tuesday 06/Jan/2004, @01:42

> Yes, the KDE project has chosen the GPL license for many parts of its "product".

While it's true that most KDE _applications_ are released under the GPL, the KDE _libraries_ (i.e. kdelibs) are (currently) all released under the LGPL (or similar licenses). So people who want to write proprietary KDE applications are free to do so provided they pay TrollTech for using Qt.

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