[quanta-devel] Cervisia again, plus greater problems

[Andras Mantia]

Hi,

On Thursday 17 March 2005 00:22, Ben Burton wrote:
> It's me writing about Cervisia licensing again.  We still haven't
> heard back from Bernd Gehrmann at this stage, which means there's not
> really much that we can do.  

I know that Bernd was about to change his job some months ago, but I can 
try to conact him on the mail addresses I know of.

> AFAICT he hasn't been around for a few 
> years now; does anyone know of a way that we might be able to contact
> him? 

I met him ~1.5 years ago personally and we exchanged some personal mails 
during the last year as well, so as I said I will try to contact him.

> Given that the QPL is GPL-incompatible, this raises issues for GPLed
> programs that wish to use this kpart.  I believe this at least
> includes quanta and kdevelop (unless I'm mistaken).

I don't think that using a GPL incompatible KPart in a GPL application 
is a problem. It may be at the corner case, but this is more like 
writing a GPL frontend to a non-GPL application. Also KParts are 
usually not a hard requirement, so embedding application are working 
fine without them as well.
 Using the Cervisia DCOP services which requires inclusion and link 
against it might be  real problem though, but as far as I know both 
Quanta and KDevelop can be compiled without the CVS part that requires 
the Cervisia DCOP services. Quanta can be for sure. ;-)

> Though IMHO (i) would be preferable, since (ii) involves many more
> people and still raises issues for any other GPLed code that kdevelop
> and/or quanta might be linked with.

We cannot change the license for the whole Quanta due to its nature 
(some developers left the project and went commercial...), but it IS 
possible to change the part of the code that uses the Cervisia part and 
DCOP services. The first was written by a developer who is no longer 
active, but I'm sure reachable and cooperative, and myself, the part 
using the DCOP services was entirely written by myself. I'm not sure if 
it's enough to change the license only for these parts of the code 
though.

Andras


-- 
Quanta Plus developer - http://quanta.sourceforge.net
K Desktop Environment - http://www.kde.org
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