.comment: Peace in Our Time?

By: Dennis E. Powell
Wednesday, September 6, 2000 08:40:37 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/opinions/2276/1/

Weird and Confusing Events

What a week--and it's only Wednesday.

On Monday, Trolltech, the developers of the Qt libraries against which KDE is built, announced that as of today Qt-2.2 is licensed under the GNU General Public License. On Tuesday, Richard M. Stallman, founder of the organized free software movement, gave Qt and KDE his blessing --sort of. (He may have, later in the day, pronounced KDE illegal after all.)

Still later yesterday Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza, founding developers of Gnome and the leaders of Helix Code, spoke of their project and KDE in largely conciliatory tones.

The score so far: Trolltech has done everything Stallman had demanded of it, but its position in the eyes of the Stallman faction seems little changed. Meanwhile, the leaders of Gnome say they are ready to call a halt to any real or perceived hostilities and let users make their choices based on the quality of the code.

From QPL to GPL--Is There No Satisfying the Man?

Qt has been licensed under something called the QPL, the important parts of which are that it is and shall forever be free for noncommercial use, but if you plan to develop a closed-source, commercial application, you'll need to pay for a license from Trolltech. The license is sufficiently liberal that the Free Software Foundation's board approved it unanimously.

This was not enough for Stallman, however; "flexible" is among the minority of adjectives that have never been used to describe him. And so, now, Qt comes under the GPL, too. The move has been roundly praised, though that from Stallman has been faint and damning.

In addition, he seems confused as to the difference between the GPL and the law. Many of us, no doubt, would jump at the opportunity to create a law or two by fiat; most of us differ with Stallman in that we know that we do not have the power to decree laws. In his Linux Today article yesterday, he pronounces various aspects of KDE as not being legal--something that he has no standing whatsoever to do. His GPL has never been before a judge. Its validity is entirely unknown. If he thought that KDE were illegal and he thought that the GPL were enforcable, he would, one might think, have taken it all to court by now. He hasn't.

He claims that putting Qt under the GPL isn't enough.

"Misusing a GPL-covered program permanently forfeits the right to distribute the code at all. Such situations have occurred in KDE, and now they ought to be cleaned up," he wrote. Authors of GPLed code used in KDE must grant "forgiveness" to KDE before the code may be legally distributed, he said. And as a sign of goodwill or something he granted blanket forgiveness for all the code owned by the FSF used in KDE--which is less than it appears to be, in that there seems to be little or no FSF-controlled code in KDE. (This could explain why KDE's developers were never taken to court: with none of FSF's code in the project, the FSF could not claim to be an injured party and would therefore be without standing. Stallman called on all authors whose GPLed code had been used in KDE to grant forgiveness, too. But again, there's been no deafening outcry from developers who thought themselves wronged, and not a single case of a developer who felt sufficiently harmed to march into court waving the GPL and demanding justice.)

Mid-morning yesterday, a post that purported to be from Stallman appeared on Slashdot . In it, the poster said that until everybody has granted "forgiveness," KDE remains "illegal" and should not be used or distributed. During the night, the poster confessed that the message was a forgery, saying that as ridiculous as it was, it was entirely believable. There was a URL associated with the post that took me to a page that I hoped was a hoax, because it left me with the distinct impression that it sought to depict someone who had made that sad step from being colorful to becoming a full-blown nutcase. My hope was dashed, though, when I found that the GNU homepage has a link to it. I think that those who follow Stallman would do themselves a favor by reading the page in its entirety.

But It's All Smiles at Helix

The peculiar and ambiguous events of the day were temporarily swept aside late yesterday afternoon when I was party to very pleasant phone interviews with Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman of Helix Code, which hopes to become a successful business by providing value-added services for Gnome users. (A news story on what they had to say about their project will appear here soon.) And while they did not, of course, endorse KDE, the sense I came away with was that there's no fundamental dislike of the rival project. In fact, Miguel says he regrets some of the highly publicized things he's said in the past about KDE.

"I wouldn't say that there are any hard feelings," he said. "There has always been a competition factor; I personally made a couple of mistakes a few years ago, but all in all, I think we have very good relations with the KDE people. There are some very nice people working with KDE, for instance Kalle Dalheimer, a great guy. I haven't had a lot of contact with most of the KDE team, but the ones I've spoken to are pretty nice people."

"What really matters is the users, the developers, the code," said Nat. "Of course, the license is important. I think what matters is what actually happens, and not what the big guns are saying at any given point.

"To me there's no Gnome-KDE war to speak of. This is not a Larry Ellison-Bill Gates thing."

But there does seem to have been a war of press releases.

"I don't think the Gnome project has done anything like that," Nat said. "If Richard Stallman does that, well, that's his choice."

What about the new Qt license?

"I'm very happy that they decided to GPL it," said Miguel, who is also on the board of the FSF. "It can only be considered a win for free software. So all in all, it's a big thing.

"I'd also like to say, 'I told you so, three years ago.' That was exactly the email I sent to the people at Trolltech three years ago, that they could still keep their dual-licensing system. It's nice that they've seen that there was an actual problem.

"I don't think it changes things, because people who actually care about licenses are a minority of the software world. That's why KDE got so much popularity independent of whether it had license problems or not. But it's going to help a lot of people who finally can have a free desktop, and that's good. But now we have two competing desktops which are pretty complete, so I don't think it makes any difference from the Gnome perspective, but I think it will encourage people to use the KDE technology and put KDE on a good legal ground."

In his article Stallman mentioned the possibility of Gnome and KDE merging oneday, but Nat says don't hold your breath.

"Gnome and KDE are very unlikely to ever be merged. I myself personally worked to try to make that happen in certain ways. We tried to make it happen, but it hasn't happened yet. Maybe it will. That would be great. We'd love that. But merging the code bases is pretty much not an option, because they're so different.

"There's a competition between the two project, but you know what? Open source is the story of parallel development efforts. This is not new. I think that there will be a clear winner; I'm obviously putting my money on Gnome, and I think it's all about developers. If you win the developers, you'll have more momentum behind you. For us, there are a lot of developers out there."

What about issues such as data file format compatability?

"That's definitely going to happen," said Nat. "That's important. I think that that won't be a problem."

Which Leaves Us With . . . .

My conversations with Nat and Miguel left me heartened. They're both pleasant and enthusiastic, and of course they favor their own project, but I got no sense that there was any desire to create or prolong any bad blood with KDE. My communications with KDE developers have revealed a similar spirit. There is always going to be a little bit of an overtone of battle, because Gnome was, after all, created, to put it in the kindest terms, in response to KDE's licensing issue; now that that issue is no longer there, it's not as if the Gnomes are going to roll up their tents and go home. I don't think anyone finds that unreasonable.

One cannot say as much for the attitude of Richard M. Stallman, who having won a victory now seems to want to loot the conquered foe. Though the posting of the forged message on Slashdot is reprehensible, it also really says nothing that Stallman himself hasn't said; it's troubling when the parody is indistinguishable from the real thing. There is no denying Stallman's contributions over time. But sadly, seeing his article and the response to it within the community, I cannot help but believe that his very inflexibility, perhaps fed by whatever it was that causes him to make 5-meg picture files of himself available for download, is likely to do a great deal of harm to the cause he has championed for so long. People are already writing him off as a totalitarian loon, and should that become the general opinion, and absent any real legal force behind the GPL, his dream will have died--and he will have killed it.