KDE Licensing Policy Updates

[Jonathan Riddell]

On Tue, Sep 20, 2016 at 07:11:10PM +0200, Luigi Toscano wrote:
> > Rationale: we have no policy for wikis but they are very important to
> > us especially with wikitoLearn so we should add one.  Our wikis are
> > currently CC 3.0+FDL but we should consider moving to CC 4.0 (CC
> > includes an or later so there's no difficultly in doing this).  FDL is
> > unmaintained and not much used so we can drop this.
> 
> I disagree with "little used". What does it mean "unmaintained"? Is the MIT 
> license maintained?
> I still would keep the dual license. Coming back later can be complicated if 
> impossible.

unmaintained means nobody cares about problems with it and there's no
updates expected.  The MIT is also unmaintained which means some
people can make claims which are untrue such as Pine authors claiming
you can't ship modified sources or people claiming additional
restrictions can be arbitrarily added and there's nobody in authority
to point out this is nonsense.

> > Changed:
> > "Documentation must be licensed under the Creative Commons
> > Attribution-Sharealike 4.0 International"
> > Rationale: Currently we use GNU FDL but that licence is unmaintained,
> > little used, problematic due to association with non-free options and
> > incompatible with the GPL.  CC-BY-SA 4 is one way compatible with the
> > GPL (code can be copied from docs to GPL code).  So I suggest moving
> > new docs to CC.
> 
> See above. That would make mixing content really complicated, especially when 
> we move from wiki to other formats or vice-versa. So same license in both 
> (dual at most).

It would make it possible to mix content from wikis to docs and to
code.  It's not currently possible to do this.

It would mean old docs couldn't be mixed with new docs as a downside.
Dual licencing with FDL would fix that but mean we couldn't copy from
anywhere else into wikis/docs which seems limiting.

Jonathan