small license problem in kdelibs

Marco Martin notmart at gmail.com
Mon Sep 26 10:45:43 BST 2011


Hi all,

last days, after we asked some more pair of eyes to check the licensing in 
plasma active, a thing was discovered: many LGPL licensed files had an header 
like that (you know, power of copy and paste ;)

/*
*   Copyright 2010 Marco Martin <notmart at gmail.com>
*
*   This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
*   it under the terms of the GNU Library General Public License as
*   published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or
*   (at your option) any later version.
*
*   This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
*   but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
*   MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
*   GNU General Public License for more details
*
*   You should have received a copy of the GNU Library General Public
*   License along with this program; if not, write to the
*   Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
*   51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301, USA.
*/

as you note, talks about library general public license, then
...PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details

while it should be

...PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU Library General Public License for more 
details

i guess it's an issue that krazy doesn't detect.

from a quick scan around kdelibs seems there are plenty of files in kdelibs 
with this same problem as well.
we are starting to correct it in libplasma, but ideally all should get 
corrected, since even if minor licensing issue, is still a license issue ;)

so, if you are/feel responsible for a particular kdelibs piece, please take a 
look if the wording is consistent,
so if is LGPL 2.0 (or 2.0 or later) it always talks about Library and if is 
2.1 always talks about Lesser


Cheers,
Marco Martin




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