Baloo Framework - License Exception

[David Faure]

Well, that's interesting, I didn't expect you would reply that :-)

> That's assuming people will look for those details. I'm unsure they will.

My suggestion is to make this fact as pro-eminent as possible.

If the framework code itself was GPL, I would advocate calling the framework
baloo-gpl. I think this should appease fears of the "slippery slope", because 
if one day we want to have a real GPL framework, we can make it part of the 
name everywhere (not just the git repo, but really everywhere, cmake targets 
etc.)

With baloo it's a bit more tricky, since it's only "effectively GPL" and we 
surely want to keep the possibility to make it really LGPL.
Still, I'm sure we can plaster the documentation, README, header files etc. 
with "this code is GPL!!!".

You know, the same issue exists even if it's not released as part of KF5.
On most distros it will be "just another package" whichever way we release it 
on our side. https://launchpad.net/~kubuntu-ci/+archive/ubuntu/unstable-daily
has attica-kf5 and baloo-kf5. From there you can't really tell that it's not a 
framework, or that it's not LGPL... But what will people do as soon as they 
start using a lib and writing code that uses it? Opening the api docs. So 
let's make it very clear there. This is needed, whether or not baloo is 
released with KF5 or separately.

> KDE app developers, not third parties... which actually begs the question:
> does Baloo provide any value outside of the KDE community? if not there's no
> rush to put it in KF5 as sebas highlighted.

The problem (and the reason I talk about shooting ourselves in the foot) is 
... what do we do instead, then, to solve the KDE issue?
We need to be able to use baloo in both "KDE Workspace" and "KDE 
applications", which are released separately and cannot depend on each other.

In fact, this is just like the portingAids subdir of the frameworks releases.
It's stuff that we release "as part of frameworks" but that is not intended for 
the outside world (= outside the KDE community).

Can we have a similar section for "GPL" frameworks?

I completely agree that the goal is to "hide" it from the outside world, but 
we still need to release it so that we can use it, for our own purposes.

> Bottom line: since there's the possibility of a non-xapian backend making
> Baloo effectively LGPL and not effectively GPL, I'd be in favor of waiting
> for it to be reality.

We need a much shorter term solution than that, for practical purposes.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, http://www.davidfaure.fr
Working on KDE Frameworks 5