Pushing AppStream upstream metadata to KDE repositories...?

[Matthias Klumpp]

2014-05-11 1:24 GMT+02:00 Alvaro Soliverez <asoliverez at kde.org>:
> Hi,
> For KMyMoney, just go ahead and commit the file. We'll see the
> notification and adjust if needed.
>
> We use GPLv2+ for all our files.
Great, I'll do that in a second.
Just a sidenote on why using the GPL etc. is not a good idea for
metadata here: The AppStream design leads to all descriptions from all
packages being bundled in one single, huge XML file on the
distribution side. If some stuff is GPL'ed, the whole file becomes
licensed under the GPL. If now something else is licensed under a
GPL-incompatible license and also needs to be in that file,
distributors can't generate it without violating a license. Using
non-permissive licenses also limits the use of this metadata slightly,
which is not desired.
As much as I love the GPL and any copylefted license (I think it's
fundamentally right to use it for any software), using it for metadata
is a bad idea. So, please use a permissive license for the
<metadata_license/> tag, like CC0-1.0, MIT etc. (some of these
licenses are listed in the AppStream spec).
Distributions will read that tag and drop metadata which they can't
combine with other works based on the value set there.

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