Funny. I came across this today in my mail... I thought it was interesting sense Michael L's post re the RH comment. This is totally unrelated by I still thought it interesting.... Basically, I think it's an extension of Gnome/KDE war with a 'recomendation' at the end to not support SuSE just because it comes with QT ! If it was inappropriate for me to forward this from the kernel list let me know by mail and I'll not repeat...I just thought SuSE linux people might find it 'interesting'. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 18 Jul 1998 16:30:53 -0600 From: Richard Stallman <rms@santafe.edu> Reply-To: rms@gnu.org To: konold@alpha.tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de, kde@lists.netcentral.net, gnome-hackers@nuclecu.unam.mx, linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu Subject: Re: Forward of posting from RMS Linus wrote: I also don't think that it can be argued that a library has to be on all distributions in order for it to be acceptable: historically many commercial UNIX vendors didn't (maybe still do not, but I no longer care since I haven't used one in quite some time) include the development environment in their standard distribution. They had the run-time parts, but not the link-time C library, for example. This is actually a simple and straightforward issue. The reason the GNU GPL permits linking with these libraries is explicit in the wording. Here are the words: the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, In all of these cases, that I have heard of, the C library for these proprietary systems is distributed either with the kernel or with the C compiler. Either way, these words explicitly permit linking with that library. In GPL version 1, this text said "with the operating system", and as a result, it did not handle the case where the compiler and the C library are distributed as a separate package from the kernel. Unix systems which did not come with C compilers began to appear around that time, so I changed these words in GPL version 2. Someone else wrote: I don't buy the "so in general it's not" weaseling, because that declares SuSE to somehow "not be a normal Linux distribution". Whether SuSE (or any other specific GNU/Linux distribution) is a normal one is not the question. The question is what is normal practice for distributing the kernel, the compiler, and other major components of the system--not directly about any particular system distribution. In other words, not "Is SuSE normal?" but rather, "Is including Qt with Linux normal? Is including Qt with GCC normal?" I do hope that SuSE's practice of including non-free software in a system distribution will not become normal. After working so hard to give people the chance to be free, I would be sad to see them throw it away for a little convenience. So I hope people will not use, install or recommend SuSE. But that is another issue. - To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e