Complex License in KI18n and KConfig Frameworks

[Alexander Potashev]

Hi Ayush,

If you look at the specific files licensed under MIT in KConfig, those
are tests only. And files with a GPL-2.0-or-later license belong to
executables that you likely won't use to create the bindings. I might
be okay to ignore their licenses.

On Wed, Jan 19, 2022 at 8:16 PM Andreas Cord-Landwehr
<cordlandwehr at kde.org> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
>
>
>


-- 
Alexander Potashev