Ktouch Typing Lessons License

[Adriaan de Groot]

Following up on what Andreas writes -- 

On Tuesday, 22 June 2021 20:52:51 CEST, Andreas Nicolai wrote:
> we got a lot of lessons from contributors over the time. Unfortunately,
> then we did not ask about the license or consent to place the lectures
> under a suitable commons license. So, for quite a lot of lectures we
> just have to use the general contributing rules for the KDE source base
> (after all they were placed inside the subversion repository, or back
> then in CVS).

The source-and-data of the application is claimed to be, currently, GPL2+, 
LGPL2+ and GFDL1.2+ .. presumably depending on the file being looked-at. 
The license texts are at

https://invent.kde.org/education/ktouch/-/tree/master/LICENSES

Now, exactly **which** license applies to which file is a bit tricky. 
KTouch is not REUSE-compliant, so not everything is tagged in a 
machine-readable form.

> For the generic lectures, the author is Havaard (original KTouch author,
> used a script to generate them from the gnu aspell dictionaries), so
> these are definitely free for the taking.
>
> My recommendation: take the lectures and don't overthink the licensing
> issues. The people who sent me the lectures were just very nice people
> wanting to help others - in that spirit I'd say the lectures are
> open-source licensed.

It can well be argued that the contributions are based on an 
inbound=outbound license, which would put the files under whatever the 
outbound license is. Which is .. one of those three in LICENSES, I guess. 
Judging from the data file, though

https://invent.kde.org/education/ktouch/-/blob/master/data/data.xml

there are individual licenses for the different courses (per language). 
Some look like GPL2 (only). Some are derived from published work (the 
published work may no longer be available). It's icky.

The pragmatist in me says "assume inbound=outbound, and pick 
GPLv2-or-later", the policy-wonk says 
"https://community.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy tells us it must be a 
license from sections 4 or 5 so GPLv2-or-later is an acceptable assumption 
here", the lawyer-only-on-TV says "stop distributing this immediately until 
some stupidly lengthy review process has figured out what's going on".


> Am 22.06.21 um 14:28 schrieb Mihai Gătejescu:
>> I am the maintainer of GNU Typist and we are trying to (re)integrate
>> the Ktouch typing lessons into our project.
>> 
>> For that I need what license applies to the files, if it is compatible
>> with GPL3+. Does anyone here know? ...