glib in kdesupport: yes or no?

[Scott Wheeler]

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Well, as much as I promised myself to stay out of this thread -- here goes...

On Monday 10 March 2003 6:12, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> The GNU project was involved in the decision to LGPL the GNOME
> libraries, and agreed with the rationale for doing so. Which is
> essentially that it promotes adoption of the software.

Quoting from the FSF site:

"For example, they may appeal to the ego, promising "more users for this 
library" if we let them use the code in proprietary software products. 
Popularity is tempting, and it is easy for a library developer to rationalize 
the idea that boosting the popularity of that one library is what the 
community needs above all."

(http://www.fsf.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html)

Those two don't seem to really fit together.  I'm assuming that was the 
document that Adam was referring to.

> GNOME made this decision historically basically the same way any free
> software project makes a big decision - in fun threads like this
> one. ;-)

:-)

> I'm not speaking for GNOME; I don't know whether it would change its
> mind. However the way I approach getting interoperability work done is
> that I just assume no one is going to change their fundamental goals
> or big-picture views on what we need to do to succeed, but that people
> are probably willing to make relatively easy compromises in order to
> achieve the benefits of interoperability.
> 
> Because I think most of those benefits can be gained (and are being
> gained - we have plenty of successes already) with relatively easy
> compromises, I think we can solve the problems.

The problem is -- at least from our perspective -- that the overwhelming 
burden of "compromise" seems to fall on the KDE community.  From all of the 
concrete examples that I've seen thus far "compromise" == "do things the 
Gnome way".  I may have missed these things since I'm not subscribed to the 
relevant lists, but could you give some example of Gnome compromising and 
doing things the KDE way?

I don't think it's fair to expect the KDE community to link to the core 
libraries of the Gnome project while saying that the Gnome project is not 
willing to link to the core libraries of the KDE project.  I know, I know, 
"tainted by the GPL" or whatever, but that just doesn't seem like the way 
that things are supposed to work.

Fundamentally here it seems like the free software community is taking a kick 
in the shins to protect proprietary software.  

And note here that I'm not completely against proprietary software, I just 
don't think that we should bend over backwards to make easier for proprietary 
software to the disadvantage of other free projects.

Cheers,

- -Scott

- -- 
Audience Member: "What is the book [on CS] that you most want to read?"
Donald Knuth: "It's not `The Art of Computer Programming for Dummies.`"
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