kdelibs/klauncher license question

Michael Pyne mpyne at purinchu.net
Thu Feb 19 01:44:08 GMT 2009


Hi all,

While looking into altering the behavior of executing .desktop files in 
response to the thread on it (and the LWN and slashdot stories) I came across 
what I believe is a mistake in licensing:

The kdelibs/kinit/proctitle.{h,cpp} files are both licenses GPLv2+ instead of 
LGPL like the rest of kdelibs.

In this case it is compiled into the executable kdeinit4 (not a library 
however).  So that's kind of a mitigating factor, but is this desired?  I 
guess really the question is does this fall into a "Source file that is part 
of a library with a public API	 which is part of KDE Platform" [1]?

klauncher itself is accessed over D-Bus and not linked to directly but it does 
provide library-like services to KDE applications (and is used as such by 
various code in kdelibs which *does* get linked in).  So is this something 
that is wrong, technically correct but undesired, or desired licensing? (The 
other files in klauncher are licensed LGPL...)?

Regards,
 - Michael Pyne

[1] http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy para. 3
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