I did try to make it clear in the document that the whole issue was about licensing.
People are free to choose any license they like for any software they write. If that license ends up saying ``You cannot distribute this program'' then Debian has decided to take that at face value and not distribute it. KDE is not the first piece of software that has been deemed undistributable by Debian, on licensing grounds, and I'm sure it won't be the last.
Other distributions may decide that they don't need to worry about these things, but Debian takes licensing rather seriously. The DFSG is what defines Debian to a large extent, and it is all about licensing.
The fact that our users can easily install KDE, by simply adding a line to their /etc/apt/sources.list, like this:
deb http://kde.tdyc.com slink kde contribshould go some way to prove that this is not some sort of anti-KDE vendetta.
While we don't consider ``non-free'' software to be part of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, we do support our users in their use of non-free packages. Our stance on KDE is a licensing issue, pure and simple, not a free/non-free bigotry issue.
See clause 5 of our Social Contract
In fact KDE is free software, as far as the source goes, it's just that it's currently not terribly useful until it is linked against the non-free Qt library, and doing that violates the GPL under which KDE is distributed.
Firstly, Qt 2.0 has not been released yet, so there is no version of Qt under the QPL, and even if it had been, KDE will need to be ported to work with the new code, so could not immediately take advantage of any licensing changes anyway.
If we ignore those points for the moment, we are still left with the more serious problem that the GPL is still incompatible with the QPL, so KDE still needs have its license changed away from the pure GPL in order to become distributable when linked against Qt.
People generally react to this statement by saying that the GPL allows one to ignore its restrictions if the linked against library which is a ``standard component'' and now that Qt is going to be free, that could be included as a ``standard component''. Unfortunately this ignores the second part of the clause, which disallows this when the two things are being distributed together.
In other words, KDE still needs a new license. Thankfully, it seems that it is going to get one in the not too distant future.
If I want to know how the KDE license (the GPL) works on the other hand, the authoritative answer is likely to come from its author, namely Richard Stallman (a.k.a RMS).
To quote a recent IRC forum:
<rms> By the way, the Qt license says it gives permission to link Qt <rms> with GPL-covered programs; however, if you actually do that, you would <rms> violate the GPL. <rms> If the authors of a GPL-covered program want to give permission for linking it <rms> with Qt, they can do so.
Admittedly, there is an implicit permission in the fact that the KDE developers clearly always intended the KDE source to be linked against Qt, so why are Debian being so pedantic about this ?
The problem is that the KDE authors keep trying to present this as though KDE is linkable against Qt as an automatic consequence of it being distributed under the GPL. This is simply untrue. It is only OK to distribute KDE linked against Qt because of the implied additional permission that they have given.
This is important because KDE developers then take the example of KDE and its GPL to justify taking and distributing other people's GPLed patches and code, without any additional permission (implicit, or explicit).
While one would like to give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that their naivety of the implications of the GPL caused them to act in this way, this is becoming increasingly difficult as they continue to ignore the facts that have now been brought to their attention.
Therefore, until the KDE developers actually face up to the situation, and explicitly state the fact that they are giving the additional permission to link their code against Qt, we have decided to take them at their word, and assume that KDE is being distributed under the GPL, and the GPL alone. This leaves us with the conclusion that we cannot distribute KDE binaries linked against Qt.