Baloo Framework - License Exception

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hi,

On Monday, December 15, 2014 10:34:46 Jonathan Riddell wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 09:27:48AM +0100, Martin Gräßlin wrote:
> > > Baloo is still LGPL, when you aggregate it current Xapian code the
> > > result
> > > becomes GPL, but I could write something different with the same header
> > > interface as Xapian and make it LGPL, and then the aggregation would be
> > > LGPL. (Or maybe not, not sure what was the result on that lawsuit saying
> > > that APIs were copyrightable or not, i guess we could always white-room
> > > it
> > >
> > > Does what am I saying make any kind of sense?
> >
> > I think Jonathan should respond to it. Your argumentation makes sense to
> > me,  but the question is whether Baloo is currently derived work of
> > Xapian or not. If there is baloo internal an abstraction allowing to
> > easily swap out Xapian by something different I would say it's not
> > derived work. But if Xapian is deeply wired into Baloo I would say it's
> > derived work.
> 
> Albert is right, Baloo is LGPL but the resulting binaries will be GPL.
> As long as we are all happy with that and we make it clear with a big
> README in the source we're good to go ahead.

I realize I'm going to party-poop here, but I think:

- we should not put LGPL in headers which effectively will be GPL code, once 
compiled. That may be 'technically correct', but it's not useful and perhaps 
actively misleading to those that use it

- GPL means it's no Frameworks material. The promise that you can just pick 
any of KDE's Frameworks under the LGPL is an important one, and it shouldn't 
be muddied by an effective GPL license in one of the frameworks, that just 
opens the door for more such exceptions, and our licensing story becomes much 
less clear. (Think back to the time when Qt was GPL, that should give *some* 
impression on what we're playing with.)

- that means, Baloo can't become a Framework at this point. Is this really 
such a big problem, as long as we're not excluding the possibility to make it 
a framework once we have a LGPL-compatible store?

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

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