[ILUG] RMS: KDE in violation of GPL

[John P . Looney]

On Wed, Sep 06, 2000 at 12:21:40PM +0100, Justin Mason mentioned:
> 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;" ;) ??

 I think Caolan said at one stage that koffice or some part of it use his
WV library...oh wait..that was abiword...

Kate

-- 
The words of the unwary are apt to cause needless pain and bloody violence.
                                                        - Zen Master Greg