[ILUG] RMS: KDE in violation of GPL

[Caolan McNamara]

At 12:34 06.09.00 +0100, Justin Mason wrote:
>John P . Looney said:
>
> >  I think Caolan said at one stage that koffice or some part of it use his
> > WV library...oh wait..that was abiword...
>
>Yeah, I remember that -- and I think they butchered it to fit it in too,
>if I recall correctly ;)  However at least that's GPLed reuse of GPLed
>code.

Just to clear up the confusion on this one I was informed that wv had made
its way into KOffice and it certainly has a haunting similarity on first
glance, but actually turns out they appear to actually have regenerated the
structures from the original documentation (I followed the same naming
scheme so all the variables look the same and so on) and then just read the
wv source for the tricky bits where the spec differs from the reality and
rewrote pieces like that for their importer. Used it as a reference, the
comment in the koffice importers source is roughly "The code is mostly derived
from the MS specs, but some of the algorithms come from the wvWare lib".

So there is no wv code in there, I'm not going to get into the nitty gritty
here as to that approach as everything is all GPL anyway so its of less than
0 import. Previously there were unlikely to be actual semilegally binding
licence issues involved on which to have a leg to stand, apart from waving
some mystical spirit of GPL about the place.

In general though the issues of duplication of work, Not Invented Here
and lack of communication lines between the two camps is more reminiscent
of corporate behaviour than the general free software thing, so let it go.

C.


--
Herein are personal opinions, you'd want to be crazed to consider
these official positions of StarOffice/Sun or even vaguely congruent.