KDE Policies to commercial apps/distributions

[Neil Stevens]

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On Tuesday November 26, 2002 07:31, Rob Kaper wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 26, 2002 at 07:26:10AM -0800, Neil Stevens wrote:
> > Of course, the published policy pre-dates any open decision making, so
> > it might not have much legitimacy.
>
> Actually, the current policy *defines* our open decision making. A
> single person had a vision of a great desktop environment, as free
> software. Anyone who jumped the bandwagon was aware that KDE is a free
> software project and by joining they (you, me, all of us) reconfirmed
> that decision.

I'm not referring to "policy" as a vague expression of accepted practices. 
I'm referring to the published license policy.  See 
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/licensing/policy.html

> I've seen many requests for change here, but not yet a serious call to
> change KDE from free software into something else.

I thought Vadim just called for KDE to do something about others using and 
modifying KDE, but maybe I'm mistaken.

> > A new anti-freedom policy could be written if most contributors wanted
> > it, but I think most would agree that it would be suicide.
>
> Indeed. I'd like to think most people joined KDE because of our ideals,
> not despite of them.

These days, I'm not sure you'd get agreement with that statement.  When 
dot.kde.org champions propreitary plugins in Konqueror, TheKompany 
proprietary development gets welcomed by significant portions of the KDE 
population, and compatibility with propreitary software is all over KDE, 
I'm not sure freedom is a universally accepted virtue in KDE anymore.

- -- 
Neil Stevens - neil@qualityassistant.com
Delenda est Carthago
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