[Kde-extra-gear] KDE SVN license policy

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday 16 April 2009, Ian Monroe wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 5:58 PM, Robby Stephenson <robby at periapsis.org> 
wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm about to move Tellico out of playground and into kdereview, and one
> > of the things I was reviewing was the license policy at
> > http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Policies/Licensing_Policy
> >
> > I need a little help with the english wording which confuses me.
> >
> > First, Tellico has been licensed under GPL2 from the beginning (2001 or
> > so). I removed the (or later version) clause from the license because it
> > didn't make sense to me to allow licensing under terms which I did not
> > know at the time.
> >
> > Tellico falls under Bullet 5 on the techbase page. Do I understand the
> > first sub-bullet under 5 to mean the (or later version) clause is
> > required, or does it mean that I get to choose GPL2 or later version
> > myself?
> >
> > In other words, I'm required to dual-license or tri-license, correct?
> > Rather than having the author choose the license version, I'm required to
> > allow the user to choose the license version? I'm planning to stay with
> > the GPL, I'm just trying to understand the restriction.
> >
> > If I'm reading that right, is there any particular reason? I've read a
> > few things about the faults of the GPL2 license, but none seem to carry
> > enough weight to forbid a GPL2-only license. Just curious...
>
> Its because of GPLv3. If you link to a library thats GPLv3 only (say,
> samba), then it would be illegal to use GPLv2.

do apps need to worry about this? our libs are lgplv2 or later, and as long as 
the app itself doesn't link against something with gplv3 then what does it 
matter?

yes, "or later" is more future proof (e.g. one of the underlying dependencies 
changes license, as samba did on us[1]), but is it really a requirement for 
apps in our svn to be licensed in such a manner if they are perfectly legal 
today?

(if so, i'm pretty sure we have a number of problems in svn right now ;)


[1] and even in that case, the things that link against that are not linked to 
by our apps: ioslaves are run out of process

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software

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