Extending the license policy to allow certain exceptions

[Albert Astals Cid]

El dijous, 25 de novembre de 2021, a les 16:42:32 (CET), Ingo Klöcker va escriure:
> Hi all,
> 
> it's not clear to me whether our licensing policy allows exceptions or not.

As far as I understand we want a "limited" number of licenses because we want to be relatively free of copying code around without having to worry [a lot] about the license.

As far as I see this means exceptions are OK as "emitters-of-code" since they give you "more" rights so you can copy from them to somewhere else without issues.

The problem is when files with exceptions are the "receivers-of-code" since you're actually breaking the license of the code-you-copied from somewhere else.

So we need to be careful about that. 

My opinion is that if we mark it *very* clearly (with license markers and maybe even with a special filename foo_gpl_with_exception.cpp?) and we have a very good reason for the exception to be there it should not be a problem.

Though how to write that into policy I am not sure :D

Cheers,
  Albert

> 
> https://community.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy does not mention any 
> exceptions.
> 
> https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Licensing explains how to use 
> exceptions and gives an example with the Qt-LGPL-exception-1.1.
> 
> I have copied code from GCC's STL to implement a QMutex-compatible replacement 
> for std::unique_lock (because apparently Windows resp. mingw doesn't have 
> std::mutex). GCC's code is "GPL-3.0-or-later WITH GCC-exception-3.1". (Ignore 
> the bogus license id in the .cpp file. I've already fixed it.) Therefore I've 
> put my Qt'ified copy under the same license.
> 
> What now? Did I violate our licensing policy? Should we explicitly add allowed 
> exceptions to our licensing policy? I guess we don't want to allow all 
> exceptions listed at https://spdx.org/licenses/exceptions-index.html.
> 
> Regards,
> Ingo
>