kdelibs and the GPL

Dominique Devriese fritmebufstek at pandora.be
Sat Jun 15 23:08:24 BST 2002


Hi,
I'm mailing you because of problems with licensing in kdelibs: either
you're the maintainer of one of the offending files, or you're
subscribed to kde-licensing at mail.kde.org, kde-core-devel at mail.kde.org
or I've mailed you in error, for which I'm sorry :)

Recently, i noticed that some files in kdelibs were under the GPL,
whereas they shouldn't be.
So I've run some scripts to find out if this was a large problem, and
I must say I have found some 35 offending files.  Neil told me that
some were ok, since they weren't linked into the libraries, but rather
stand-alone programs like kdeinit and such, but there are still a lot
of problematic files.

The command i used was:
licensecheck $(find -name *.cpp -o -name *.h) | grep -e [^L]GPL > licensecheck.output
which gave these offending files (the ones which are not libs filtered
out):
./kate/part/katebookmarks.cpp: GPL (version 2 or later) 
./kate/part/katebookmarks.h: GPL (version 2 or later) 
./kate/part/katecodecompletion_arghint.cpp: GPL (version 2 or later) 
./kate/part/katecodecompletion_arghint.h: GPL (version 2 or later) 
./kate/part/katecodecompletion.cpp: GPL (version 2 or later) 
./kate/part/katecodecompletion.h: GPL (version 2 or later) 
./kate/plugins/isearch/ISearchPlugin.cpp: GPL (version 2 or later) 
./kate/plugins/isearch/ISearchPlugin.h: GPL (version 2 or later) 
./kdeui/kaccelgen.h: GPL (version 2 or later) 
./kdeui/kaccelmanager.cpp: GPL (version 2 or later) 
./kdeui/kaccelmanager.h: GPL (version 2 or later) 
./kdeui/kaccelmanager_private.h: GPL (version 2 or later) 
./khtml/domtreeview.cpp: GPL (version 2 or later) 
./khtml/domtreeview.h: GPL (version 2 or later) 
./kio/bookmarks/kbookmarkdrag.h: GPL 
./kio/bookmarks/kbookmarknotifier.h: GPL (version 2 or later) 
./kio/kfile/kdiskfreesp.cpp: GPL (version 2 or later) 
./kio/kfile/kdiskfreesp.h: GPL (version 2 or later) 
./kio/kfile/kmetaprops.cpp: GPL 
./kio/kfile/kmetaprops.h: GPL 
./kio/misc/ktelnetservice.cpp: GPL (version 2 or later) 
./kstyles/keramik/pixmaploader.cpp: GPL (version 2 or later) 
./kstyles/keramik/pixmaploader.h: GPL (version 2 or later) 


If one of you is the maintainer of any of these files, i think you
should change the copyright.  To do that, I think you should ask all
contributors if they agree and such...
For this to work i rely on the licensecheck script from
kdesdk/scripts.  It is possible there are offending files i haven't
found, since i have only searched for GPL files.

bye
domi
PS: i've tried to extract your addresses from the offending files with
a script, but that was rather error-prone, so I'm sorry if you get
this mail in error.

-- 
Dominique Devriese
http://users.pandora.be/frit/domi.gpg
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