[kde-community] licence policy updates

Michael Pyne mpyne at kde.org
Sun Feb 16 20:25:31 GMT 2014


On Fri, February 14, 2014 10:31:24 Jonathan Riddell wrote:
> I've made some proposed changes to the KDE Licensing Policy
> 
> http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy/Draft
> 
> Most significant is the inclusion of GPL 3+ as an option in response
> to a request by GCompris and a desire voiced by a few people not to
> treat it as an exception.

I was writing up a short draft guide on how to pick a license which got me to 
looking at our current FLA Relicensing Policy (v1.3.1, 
http://ev.kde.org/resources/FRP.pdf).

Although it speaks to relicensing under the FLA process (the FLA form itself 
mentions GPL and LGPL without giving versions), it also gives a flat list of 
acceptable KDE licenses, split in license groups. AFAICS this is *the* list of 
permissible licenses as determined by the e.V. General Assembly, whether 
contributors adopt into the FLA or not.

I noticed that GPLv3 *is* an acceptable license for non-library code, either 
GPLv3, GPLv3+, or GPLv3 w/ Qt exceptions. GPLv2 is certainly a valid option 
but it does not appear to be mandatory.

The FRP also lists the Techbase Licensing Policy page as being informative, 
not normative (end of ยง2 on page 2).

It seems to me that GCompris is already in license compliance and that we need 
merely update the Licensing Policy page to conform to the allowed licenses in 
the FRP.

Please let me know if I'm missing something.

Regards,
 - Michael Pyne



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