[ILUG] RMS: KDE in violation of GPL

[Justin Mason]

Paul Jakma said:

> Even worse the KDE crowd took other people's GPL code and incorporated
> it without permission into a non-GPL work!

As an author of free software, this would *piss me off*.  That's why I use
the GPL.

It's all very nice mixing and matching, but I for one use the GPL for a
reason. I don't want my code winding up in someone else's product that may
or may not be free at some stage down the line -- I want it to stay free.

Does anyone have more details of what exactly was copied?  RMS says:

  In addition, in some cases code was copied into KDE from existing
  GPL-covered modules whose copyright holders had not given special
  permission. (Only the copyright holders can give extra permission to do
  things that the GPL does not permit.) That is a real violation of the
  GPL.  Because of this, and the overall lack of an explicit exception,
  the legal status of KDE remained clouded. 

And the KDE response says:

  There are only two parts of KDE that have GPLed code not written
  explicitely for KDE -- a small bit in kmidi and a few lines in
  kghostview.

I wonder how many lines exactly?  And were they "deep magic" lines or
"i++; return i;" ;) ??

--j.