KCalendarSystemChinese - calendar for Chinese in KDE 4

Liang Qi cavendish.qi at gmail.com
Thu Dec 27 13:42:36 GMT 2007


Hi, John,

Thanks a lot for having a look at my code.

I had contacted with the author of ccal and NOVAS before I wrote my
code, the author of ccal said it's not a big problem to relicense his
code in mail, I will try to get more official reply on it.

The author of NOVAS said it's no problem to using their code:

============================================
From: George Kaplan [Contractor] <gkaplan at usno.navy.mil>
To: Liang Qi <cavendish.qi at gmail.com>
Date: 8 Nov 2007 19:36
Subject: Re: about the license of NOVAS

Dear Mr. Liang,

The NOVAS software, both Fortran and C, is in the public domain.  That is,
there is no license and you can use it freely.  We do ask that you
acknowledge the U.S. Naval Observatory in any documentation,  papers, or
other writing about any software that uses NOVAS.

      George
============================================

And do you need the original mail of above?

I didn't mentioned the problem about The Lunar Outreach code before, I
am not very familiar about it, I will try to find more info and
resolve it later.

Thanks again.

Regards,
Liang
- Hide quoted text -

On 23/12/2007, John Layt <johnlayt at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> I've started having a look at this, and there are a lot of code style issues
> that would need to be resolved before it could be included in kdelibs, but
> nothing insolvable.  However, there is a larger issue that needs to be
> addressed first and that is licensing, which as it stands would prevent us
> ever using the code.
>
> The ccal code you've included is licensed under the GPL, but kdelibs policy is
> to use the LGPL.  Unfortunately, while LGPL -> GPL relicensing is allowed,
> you cannot reuse GPL code under the LGPL without first obtaining the
> permission of the author.
>
> I have yet to locate the license conditions for the NOVAS library routines you
> copied, but as they are the product of the US Navy I'm assuming they are in
> the Public Domain and so should be OK.  From a style point, these routines
> should be separated out into a private class, or better yet see if KStars
> provides equivalent routines that can be shared as I'm sure other
> astronomically based calendars could reuse them.
>
> The Lunar Outreach code appears to be licensed "for non-commercial usage only"
> which is also unacceptable to be reused without the authors express
> permission (we apparently have hit this before in 2000, see
> http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=96521623221875&w=2).  Again, perhaps
> KStars could provide what you need?
>
> (As an aside, links to the homepages for the included code should be in the
> code header as part of the documentation to make tracing it easier.)
>
> Hopefully, you don't find this too discouraging, but we do need to keep on the
> right side of copyright law.  If you are able to either obtain permission to
> relicense under the LGPL (and we would need to archive the confirmation
> emails somewhere), or can obtain suitable replacement LGPL or Public Domain
> code, then I'd be very happy to help you improve the code to meet kdelibs
> standards.
>
> Cheers!
>
> John.




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