Re: SEUL: What's the diff to SEUL ?

[George Bonser <grep@oriole.sbay.org>]

On Sat, 17 Jan 1998, Micah Yoder wrote:

> I've been thinking a little more on that one.  3 points:
> 
> 1.  I agree that all software *WE WRITE* should be based completely on
> free software.  However, does that mean we can't distribute Qt and the
> (increasing number of) free applications that use it?

I agree, I am going to sub myself to seul-dev-dist and see if we can't get
this discussion over there. I think that is where the discussion of what
the distribution should include should take place.

An important thing is that if this is to be the basis for commercial Linux
distributions, we can not sell Qt and it should not be in the core
distribution that others would be expected to sell in the future. It
really needs to be in a non-free area that can be kept firewalled from
the primary distribution. The user can always obtain it by FTP but we can
not make any portion of the main distro depend on Qt.  Unless someone
wants to donate a Qt license.

> 
> 2.  I recently read the free license and it's FAQ.  Basically, it said
> that there is no problem with including it in a Linux distrubtion. 

True but you can not SELL Qt.  They are not clear enough.  What if I have
a $400 linux distribution like Caldera OpenLinux-Standard? What if the
default desktop and the admin tools all require Qt and I ship it with the
Distro. It becomes a grey area and I really do not feel like being hauled
into court, I have enough to keep me busy already.

> Also, it gave a number of reasons why Troll will *never* revoke the free
> license.  And I agree - it's giving them a *lot* of good publicity.  If
> I understand correctly, our biggest beef with the license is the
> possibility of it being revoked...but if they did that they'd only screw
> themselves!


My biggest beef is the nature of its per-programmer/per-platform
mumbo-jumbo.  You have to buy a license for each programmer that can touch
the source tree. It is not a per-processor license or a concurrent
programmer license.  You buy a license for each programmer even if they
are not actively working on the source at the moment.  If we had a
distributed project with 10 people that could work in the source tree, you
need to buy 10 licenses even if only two people are working at any one
time.

> Commercial software vendors can use Motif, Xforms, GTK, Qt,
> whatever...it's their choice.  We should try to support them all.  If
> they want what appears to be the best toolkit (Qt), they pay for it.  If
> they don't, they develop for GTK.  It would all work in SEUL.

Fine but as I said, I really do not think KDE can be the default. It can
be an add-on but we can not count on using it for our "look and feel". 

> I'm not saying we should use KDE as the desktop.  We could, but GNOME
> appears to be taking shape nicely.  But KDE applications can run without
> using it as the window manager, and I still don't think we should refuse
> to distribute anything that uses Qt.  There's a lot of good stuff out
> there for it!

Sure, we can put all that stuff in non-free and the users can have a ball
with it.  We would not distribute it with "Official SEUL CD's" but the
users could connect to the site and grab what they want via FTP.

And THAT is the strength of dselect over glint.  I can connect to the
site, get a menu of what is available, pull the packages and they install.
Maybe someone could write a Tk/Tcl front-end?  All dselect is, is a
menuing system and front end for dpkg and dpkg-ftp.


George Bonser 
If NT is the answer, you didn't understand the question. (NOTE: Stolen sig)
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