Licensing for cxx-kde-frameworks (Rust bridge for KF6)

[Neal Gompa]

On Wed, Oct 30, 2024 at 7:04 PM Darshan Phaldesai
<dev.darshanphaldesai at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello!
> I am working on a rust bridge for KF6 called `cxx-kde-frameworks`. It is
> built on top of `cxx-qt` by KDAB. It will allow you to make applications
> (and maybe widgets :) ) completely in rust.
> The project is in the process of incubation and releasing it's first
> version. (https://invent.kde.org/libraries/cxx-kde-frameworks).  I am
> not sure of what sort of license should be used for such a project and
> would appreciate any advice.
>
> Few considerations:
> First, I plan to include bridges for most libraries needed for
> application development and so need to consider their licenses as well.
> Second, This project will only hold the "bridge" code and thus users
> will still need to install the libraries. I don't think this should
> cause any license violations but the bridge code is based of the method
> signatures of the original libraries.
> Third, Upstream `cxx-qt` project uses Apache-2.0+MIT and I planned to do
> the same but KDE's Licensing policy doesn't mention any thing about
> Apache-2.0.
> I will appreciate any information and help in this regard.
>

My understanding is that the KDE community prefers copyleft licensing
for our projects. Unfortunately, the GNU licenses don't exactly match
up well with Rust due to default static linking. IMO, to maintain the
LGPL "spirit" for our libraries and frameworks, we probably should
have our Rust stuff MPL-2.0 licensed.

Personally speaking, I'm in that camp as well, and I also think the
dual-license of MIT and Apache-2.0 is weird and pointless since the
latter license has the same effect as the former.

My recommendation would be to license all our Rust-language stuff to be MPL-2.0.



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