[OT] Opinions about licensing approach for permissive/weak-copyleft projects

[Filipe Saraiva]

Dear kommunity,

I am on the reviewing process of a paper submission about open source
licensing, and one of the reviewers has one concern that I would like to
discuss it a bit further with you. The paper is not directly related to
KDE, but I am writing to this mailing list to get some opinions from my
KDE friends, in particular, due to your experience with open source
licensing.

The reviewer proposes an approach for software licensing. In summary,
s/he believes that if the project is using exclusively permissive or
weak copyleft licenses, there is no need to put a license for the entire
project.

On his/her words: "You don't need to specify a package-level license.
What you can do is put a "default" license to your package which would
mean that in the absence of a license in a file, that file would be
under this license. This allows not having to specify the license in all
files (although that is the recommended way of doing things). Note that
this default license should be permissive or weak copyleft."

I understand that his/her suggestions make sense (this would allow novel
tools to improve license visualization, like that color bar that GitHub
uses for programming languages could be used),  but I also wonder
whether this would make sense in practice (this would require that all
source code files are properly licensed).

I have my own opinions, but I would like to hear the kommunity about
your feelings on that proposal and possible advantages/disadvantages.

All the best,

-- 
Filipe Saraiva
http://filipesaraiva.info/

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