Using Sheets as a library

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Mon, 2012-11-26 at 10:29 +0100, Inge Wallin wrote:

Hi Inge,

> The idea is that all of Sheets and in fact all of Calligra should be under 
> LGPL.  There are a couple of exceptions, mostly for historical reasons: Krita 
> and a couple of 3rd party libraries.

What is important in that case is that Sheets does not link with any
code of those programs or libraries, like Krita, that are for historical
reasons right now GPL.

If Sheets code does need to link with any of those then the current
license of Sheets would already funnily be in violation with the GPL
license of for example Krita ;-).

The viral nature of the GPL would in that case mean that Sheet's license
is again GPL and not LGPL.

But .. IANAL

Personally, I would try to relicense everything of Calligra to LGPL to
avoid any such issues. Dual licensing is often just a burden and tends
to get ugly. Better to do everything in LGPL instead (this is just my
personal experience with the GNOME Tracker project where we also tried
to maintain a dual licensing model, where also for historical reasons
some parts where GPL, and where we often just rewrote the old code to
avoid all this stuff - and during the rewrites we usually massively
improved the quality and performance of the code).

> As you write yourself, the ui files are not difficult to recreate but let's 
> try to talk with Stefan and Marijn first and see if they have anything against 
> changing the licenses to LGPL. I'm 99% sure that they don't.

Yep. Due to the .ui files made by Marijn and Stefan and GPL's viral
nature is Sheets right now already GPL and not LGPL.

But .. IANAL

It's most likely accidentally and just because Marijn and Stefan didn't
mind; I think if Calliga's main idea is to use LGPL for its components
then this is important.

> As for exporting the sheets library, it is our intention to make it easier to 
> use our code in many different situations so I think I speak for most of us 
> when I say we are interested in your code. When you want to contribute it 
> back, just put it up on git.reviewboard.kde.org and we will take a look.

Yes. I however wonder how the Calligra team would prefer the patches to
be. I could restructure the entire project so that it becomes multiple
projects (I don't recommend this direction), or I could just make
adaptations to the CMakeFile.txt in sheets/ and the libraries that
calligrasheetscommon.so depends on, and adapt the CMakeFile.txt of them
all to also install the .h files in a directory in /usr/include, for
example /usr/include/calligra/sheets for Sheets.

I must confess that my experience lies more with that mind bogglingly
strange and ugly autotools thing, and not with cmake, but then again,
I'm a software developer because I want to learn new things regularly.

	;-)

Kind regards,

Philip


-- 


Philip Van Hoof
Software developer
Codeminded BVBA - http://codeminded.be