[Kde-pim] Respect the GPL! (was Re: License change.)

[Christian Weilbach]

Dear Tobias Koenig,

> > > What is the deal with relicensing the stuff under LGPL anyway?
> > > They are libs, and they were always meant to be.
> >
> > Right, nevertheless that doesn't mean that they have to be LGPL
> > licensed at all. Using LGPL just means that propritary software can
> > link against them
>
> So what's wrong about proprietary software being able to link against them?

Because they won't give anything back. You are right, they will get money for 
everything they code and therefore won't even give back a single line of code 
in general.

>
> > Richard Stallman made a good separation:
>
> In my opinion Richard Stallman has some very sick opinions.
> Sad to see GNU is undermining more and more free software
> projects.

Sorry, but you don't mean free software here. You simply mean open-source 
projects and that also means open-source projects with a commercial interest.
Open-source is simply a different technical approach in programming software, 
free software is a different approach in social networking. This is a 
categorial difference!
Commercial interests are always(!) against the users freedom, because they 
have to make sure you pay them as much as possible. I don't say that you have 
to dislike that, but it definetly is not free software. As long as companies 
keep their commercial interest in the software support area, software freedom 
is not threatened, but it is otherwise.
Without Stallman many software issues would limit many of you and especially 
KDE development today. If there were a license compatibility mess you could 
not get a consistant system or you have to rewrite everything yourself. Have 
a look at the Minix development back then. And imagine some company like 
Xandros would use KDE code and building a technically better Desktop on top 
of it with a propietary license or Apple doing the same with KHTML. Would you 
like to spend your time and code to that?

>
> > If your library brings new value which makes GPL software better
> > than propritary software then use GPL, so people will be forced to
> > use free software
>
> Why should it be necessary to separate from fellow software developers?
> Just because they want money for _their own_ code? They don't (!) steal
> anything. The free library stays free. They just get paid for their _own_
> code, with some help from free software.

Free software is principally(!) NOT getting money for your code and you have 
to keep the free software "world" clean of this to ensure this freedom. 
I know that many people use free software to get skills or to improve their 
curriculum vitae, like GSoC students often do. 
But I really feel some discomfort with that. Companies like Google make 
millions with social information networks and this is a cheap way to buy the 
community and bind some motivated students to your company. They are not 
simply good, they are a billion dollar business. If you simply take them in 
your world to get some quick improvements and don't be careful they soon try 
to take control to get as much influence as possible and you won't even 
recognize it, if you don't know what freedom is. Maybe you will recognize it 
in ten years, when it is too late or you simply sell yourself to them, too.
Google has never open-sourced Google Earth for example, because it is 
proprietary image material they use. But if they have a strong idealistic 
interest in FOSS, why don't they buy the rights of the images and change them 
to a share a like license?
They want to keep you using Google Software to get all personal information 
from you and sell it to the highest bidder or the next big web 2.0 hype 
project of them. Remember the open-source client shut down by Google?

>
> > if they want to profite from this feature.
>
> Fellow programmers should not profit from free software? There are
> millions of users who profit from free software. Even thousands of
> small and large companies do. So fellow programmers should not profit
> from it just because they _produce_ software? If someone wants release
> a piece of software under a free license, he will do it. There's no need
> to force anybody doing this.

He won't, I wouldn't and you wouldn't, too, if you can buy yourself a new 
Porsche otherwise or can live the rest of your life without working, which is 
basically the sense of business. And hell yeah software is a strong business 
with a strong interest in money.
It is not about forcing him to use your license, but it is about forcing him 
to respect your work and your interest about software freedom. He can always 
reimplement the software with a proprietary license himself. 

You mean profit is money is freedom? Once again, please distinguish between 
commercial profit and freedom. Freedom is a serious issue and Stallman knows 
that. He is not simply some nerd sitting around and trying to terror the 
world. Nobody would care for him (see Theodor de Raath for example). He and 
FSF made free software possible and they spend their lifetime to ensure that 
freedom without getting big cash, which Stallman for sure could have got.

Cheers,
Christian Weilbach
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