[kde-edu]: copyright & kvtml and still a lot of things to do -

[Kasim Terzic]

Frederik wrote:
>lazy as I am, also not a lawyer, I had no answer to the copyleft question.
>I talked to someone who knows it better today, so here is what I found out:
>Contributions to the KDE-project which includes the kvtml stuff have to be
>according to: http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy/Draft
>
>This boils down to GPL/LGPL or BSD basically.
>
>CC (Creative Commons) is not accepted by Debian as free.
>Debian has high and good copyright standards, so if we want redistributable
>files, it would be great to adhere to that.

The Chinese HSK kvtml files are automatically generated from several
sources which are either public domain or freely distributable (with
the knowledge of the authors), and the CEDICT project, which has its
own license (included in the tarball) and which can be read at
http://www.foolsworkshop.com/fl/cedictlic.txt

There is also a Creative Commons fork of CEDICT which I could migrate
to (by basically redoing the entire database -- a lot of effort), but
this wouldn't solve the Debian licensing issues either, so I'm not
really in a hurry to do it.

Unless a native speaker sits down and translates the 10,000 phrases
and characters in the HSK kvtml database, there will be no BSD/GPL
version. The current version is fine as a download from the KDE site
(KDE is not a for-profit corporation), but distribution in commercial
distros is not allowed as things stand right now.

cosmo