[Konsole-devel] targeting OpenEmbedded at firmware environment on Motorola A780

[lars.doelle at on-line.de]

Joe, Andrew,

thanks for the note. This is indeed a case of a license violation. The program
is clearly based on the konsole source and i have not permitted to license a
derivate under anything but the GPL, beside a true port to python under a GPL
compatible license.

I have in general absolutely no problems with any port or derivate, and find it
even nice to learn that the konsole core runs well on phone, as long as people
handle their licensing homework properly.

http://www.dewmill.com/filesx/qonsole_b.zip
http://www.dewmill.com/linuxphone.html

appear to be main distribution site. Do you know of others? I've seen some
postings related to qonsole at motorolafans.com.

I'll attempt to clarify the issue.

Thanks again, Lars



On Monday 10 July 2006 22:20, Joe Wells wrote:
> [ CC-ed to Lars Doelle because the copyright of his work on konsole is
>   at issue. ]
> 
> Andrew Barr <andrew.james.barr at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > On Monday 10 July 2006 12:10, Joe Wells wrote:
> >> Unfortunately, much of this work has been done by people who like
> >> to distribute binaries and appear not to like to share source (you
> >> can see this stuff at motorolafans.com), so I may have to repeat
> >> some of this work.


> > Well, if this software is GPL'd (or under a similar
> > compulsory-sharing license) they have no choice. People should be
> > telling them this, and preferably also notifying the copyright
> > holder(s) so they can pursue the matter.
> 
> Some of the software may indeed be covered by the GPL.  An example is
> qonsole, which is available as a binary for the A780 and appears to be
> a stripped-down version of an earlier program also called qonsole,
> which is a Qt/Embedded-only port of konsole.  I found the sources of
> the earlier qonsole, and there were lots of claims of copyrights but
> no clear statement of license anywhere.  That in turn is derived from
> konsole, a KDE program, part of the kdebase package which is marked at
> the root (but not inside the konsole directory) as being GPL.  I'm not
> sure what license konsole was under when qonsole was forked from it;
> there is an indication in the ChangeLog that the license was changed
> to GPL2 at some point but I am not sure it was GPL before that.
> 
> I'm guessing that the copyright holders (Lars Doelle and others, Lars
> is CC-ed on this message) could stop motorolafans.com from
> redistributing their qonsole binary.  This kind of thing is one
> motivation for assigning copyrights to the FSF, because they can take
> action more easily than individual software authors.
> 
> > People that do this kind of stuff frustrate me to no end.
> 
> Agreed!
>