Common Public License (CPL)

Waldo Bastian bastian at kde.org
Mon Mar 6 00:40:42 GMT 2006


According to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#SoftwareLicenses 
the CPL / IPL is incompatible with the GPL. So it would be inappropriate to 
use it in combination with KTTS which is licensed under the GPL. Even though 
there may exists good legal arguments otherwise, KDE prefers to follow the 
interpretation of the GNU project wrt the GPL as much as possible for 
political reasons. For this reason the CPL is unlikely to be added to the KDE 
list of approved license since the purpose of this list is to prevent 
undesired license interaction due to a poor choice of licenses and to put a 
limit on unbound license proliferation within the KDE repository.

Is there any particular reason why these stub libraries can't be licensed 
under a BSD license? Unless IBM is of the opinion that this API deserves 
copyright protection, it seems to me that there are very little protectable 
elements in this stub in the first place.

Cheers,
Waldo

On Friday 03 March 2006 07:39, George Kraft wrote:
> This past January 10th I released IBM TTS SDK on sourceforge.net that
> open sourced eci.h and a stub library (no runtime) for GNU/Linux
> distributions and applications to build with.
>
> Currently, if a blind user purchases the IBM TTS Runtime and installs
> it, then applications like KTTS, gnome-speech, speech dispatcher, and
> emacspeak won't find it because they were not originally compiled with
> it; however, the SDK is intended to resolve that by providing a header
> file and dummy library for the developers/distributors to compile with
> it.  The alternative is that blind end-users would need to recompile
> portions of their desktop.
>
> The reason that I am writing is that I am getting some resistance
> regarding SDK's CPL license.  It is my understanding that CPL is similar
> to LGPL in that it is not "viral" like GPL.  Applications should be able
> to use a CPL header file and link to a CPL stub library and be fine.
> If KDE could add CPL to the license list, then KTTS and other
> accessibility applications could take advantage of SDK to better enable
> the desktop.
>
> http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-accessibility&m=113745813727551&w=2
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