kdelibs/klauncher license question

[David Faure]

On Thursday 19 February 2009, Michael Pyne wrote:
> The kdelibs/kinit/proctitle.{h,cpp} files are both licenses GPLv2+ instead of 
> LGPL like the rest of kdelibs.

Yes (this is because this code comes from ProFTPD, we didn't write it ourselves)

> 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]?

kdeinit4 is not a library, so obviously it doesn't fall into this.

> 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).

This isn't about klauncher, but about kdeinit. klauncher is a different process.
I don't see any relation with klauncher.

On the other hand, kdeinit forks and dlopens KDE code, but so what? It's just
one way to start KDE apps, it doesn't change the fact that you can use the app
normally without kdeinit (so the app isn't "tainted" in that case).

> So is this something  
> that is wrong, technically correct but undesired, or desired licensing? (The 
> other files in klauncher are licensed LGPL...)?

I don't think the notion of undesired or desired or mistake enters the picture at all,
this code is GPL, that's a fact we can't change.
On the other hand it's buggy (I'm getting loads of valgrind warnings as soon as
kdeinit does a getenv) so maybe we have to rewrite it anyway ;-)

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Qt Software @ Nokia to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).