[Kde-games-devel] Licensing for Gluon

[Parker Coates]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 10:48, Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen  wrote:
> On Wednesday 27 January 2010 15:59:32 Stefan Majewsky wrote:
>> Am Mittwoch, 27. Januar 2010 12:33:14 schrieb Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen:
>> >   Currently, the Gluon codebase contains a number of different licenses,
>> >
>> > some of which i understand are incompatible with the KDE license policy.
>> > As such, a few of us decided (spurred on by troy) to launch this little
>> > discussion about the issue.
>>
>> Could you please give an overview which licenses are currently used?
>
>  i do not have the full overview to hand, and the codebase is rather large,
> but i know that there is currently in use at least the following:
>
>  * GPLv2 (Creator)
>  * GPLv3 (GluonCore)
>  * No license at all (some of the files lack license information entirely)
>
>  As i understand it, specifically GPLv3 is a big problem since it's
> incompatible with KDE's library policy.

It's not just that GPLv3 is incompatible with the policy, but that
it's incompatible with the actual licensing of the KDE libraries. (A
small, but important distinction.)

Have you taken this to kde-licensing yet? They're the folks with the
real know how in this area and they'll be aware of the loopholes and
corner cases you're likely to hit.

Personally, I would think your options are LGPLv2+ or GPLv2+ for both
GluonCore and GluonCreator.

>> > P.S.: The issue here does not include that of games created using Gluon
>> > Creator: The reason for this is that they are irrelevant to this, since
>> > they are content, and as such licensed independently.
>>
>> The license choice for Gluon _can_ limit the license choice for apps using
>> Gluon. For example, GPL libraries may only be linked by GPL applications,
>> while LGPL libraries allow any license for linking applications.
>
>  For this bit to make sense, i should probably need to explain what i meant:
> Games created using Gluon Creator are not binaries, but rather a collection of
> assets (some of which are scripts defining game logic). What this means is
> that they are more a kind of document - so for licensing purposes you're
> looking at something much closer to an odf file (which is similarly an archive
> with some assets in it, making up a document) rather than a program.

When such games are distributed, do they run inside GluonCreator or on
top of GluonCore or on top of some other helper library?

Parker