Complex License in KI18n and KConfig Frameworks

[Andreas Cord-Landwehr]

Hi Ayush,

thank you for bringing this topic up to the mailing list. From the choice of 
licenses, IMHO it comes to either use a permissive license that is compatible 
with as much source code as possible (that would be probably either MIT or 
BSD-2-Clause) or using a smallest common denominator copyleft license to which 
the code of the library is compatible (which would be "LGPL-2.1-only OR 
LGPL-3.0-only OR LicenseRef-KDE-Accepted-LGPL" AFAIS).

I am not sure, how much inspiration from the existing copyleft licensed code 
is required when creating the bindings. If enough is required to say that you 
are creating a derived work, then you should take the latter approach in order 
to avoid copyright problem.

I am looking forward for further opinions :)

Best regards,
Andreas

On Mittwoch, 19. Januar 2022 05:10:35 CET Ayush Singh wrote:
> I am the author of [ki18n](https://crates.io/crates/ki18n) Rust
> bindings and am currently working on bindings for
> [kconfig](https://invent.kde.org/oreki/kconfig-rs) as a part of Season
> of KDE.
> 
> When I was trying to decide on a License for KConfig bindings, I was
> informed by Jos van den Oever, my mentor for SOK, that it would be
> best to use a license that does not conflict with the upstream KDE
> Framework. However, both KConfig and KI18n have different licenses for
> different parts of the code. So I am not quite sure what the License
> for the bindings should be.
> 
> Here is the License distribution for KConfig:
> ```
> 2  BSD-2-Clause
> 2  BSD-3-Clause
> 2  GPL-2.0-or-later
> 3  LGPL-2.0-only
> 5  LGPL-2.1-only OR LGPL-3.0-only OR LicenseRef-KDE-Accepted-LGPL
> 28  MIT
> 75  LGPL-2.0-or-later
> ```
> 
> And here is the License distribution for KI18n:
> ```
> 5  CC0-1.0
> 6  LGPL-2.1-only OR LGPL-3.0-only OR LicenseRef-KDE-Accepted-LGPL
> 9  BSD-3-Clause
> 14  ODbL-1.0
> 54  LGPL-2.0-or-later
> ```
> 
> So, what should be the License for the bindings for these Frameworks?
> LGPL-2.0-or-later seems to be the most widely used in both cases.