Hi Hugo, hi everyone,

On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 13:30, Hugo Roy hugo@fsfe.org wrote:

Le lundi 27 février 2012 à 13:14 +0100, Myriam Schweingruber a écrit :

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Hi all,

Hi Myriam,

Maybe this would be best addressed with discussion@fsfeurope.org so that everyone can participate.

Including discussion, you are right, that should have been my first target list :)

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today I came across this discussion thread:

http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=99425

The arguments the users gives in his reply seem quite wrong to me, but I have a serious cold currently and I struggle to write up something that makes good sense. It would be nice if somebody could reply from the "KDE is an associated organisation to the FSFE" POV. I know quite a few of us use KDE and are certainly better than me in arguing in that thread :)

I don't know if saying KDE is associated to the FSFE would really help. After all, KDE prefers the GPL not because FSFE told them so, but because they have a right and a benefit to do that :)

I totally agree on that. But if the KDE is actually an associate organisation it is because the KDE Community adheres to the same principles about Free Software.

But as I said, I have some difficulties in formulating a good answer. I do agree with you that his reasoning is seriously flawed and I think this needs to be corrected, hence my mail :)

Anyway, looking quickly at the answer, some things are factually and legally wrong. Here's my NSHO (not-so-humble-opinion)

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The relicensing will give much benefit to the small project like Haiku (operating system) who believe to licensed their OS with permissive license. GPL will hamper their objective, because combining Haiku and KDE can risk future objective of Haiku just because the entire combination must be relicensed under GPL.

I know personally a Haiku developer. I never heard of such things and anyway, since Haiku already has its own custom DE, etc. this does not make a lot of sense factually. I've asked the haiku developer for more details on that.

Legally combining Haiku with KDE would not mean "the entire combination must be relicensed under GPL." That's totally outside the reach of GPL's copyleft.

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So I think the best solution for that is LGPL (I even didn't recommend permissive license). This is a solution that satisfies those who wish to produce free software, and also those producing proprietary software or having different goal.

I'd say the opposite: it's a solution that will probably satisfy no one.

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The free software is still free, and the derivative still get back to the community. But this is give more freedom to the developers to treat their own implementation as they wish (free as freedom ;) ).

So it gives more freedom to some developers to take away freedom from the users (i.e. also from other developers) which is exactly against the concept of "getting back to the community."

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GPL will limit this freedom, because even with some other free software GPL, still have compatibility issues.

Saying that GPL limits freedom is totally untrue. The GPL gives more rights than copyright law ever gives to users (restricting freedom would mean to give less rights); and the GPL safeguards rights of users compared to non-copyleft licenses, thus giving more freedom to everyone.

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We can see by ourself even the free software still need proprietary software. Device driver, flash, codec, etc. Freedom of software is very important, but the usefulness of software is much more important. Linux without binary bloob is useless. Distro without proprietary codec cannot playback our favorite movie.

That doesn't make any sense to me.

Thanks a lot for your input :)

Regards, Myriam

-- Hugo Roy                           im: hugo@jabber.fsfe.org  French Coordinator               mobile: +33.6 0874 1341

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