[Kde-pim] Relicense request for servertest.*

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Tuesday 08 May 2007 23:12, Tom Albers wrote:
> Op di 8 mei 2007 22:55 schreef u:
> > On Tuesday 08 May 2007 20:42, Tom Albers wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I will move servertest.* (class used to query server
> > > capabilities) to the libs, requiring a license change to LGPL.
> > > Please let me know if you agree to it.
> >
> > What if I don't? :o
> >
> > Every month one of these requests. And no-one is even using the
> > fact that these libs are LGPL, it's just an exercise in masochism.
> > This is getting boring, you know. Really.
>
> Yep. You think I'm doing this because I've fun in it? Finding the
> licensees and asking permission is stupid work, dealing with bounces
> and googling for recent addressess sucks even more.

I have to admit that I'm with Marc here. I am really wondering why we 
torture ourselves by restricting ourselves to LGPL-licensed libraries 
forcing us to relicense every bit of code we want to move to a shared 
library. Why can't we simply accept GPL-licensed libraries? After all, 
we are the only users of those libraries. I don't buy that 
whatstheirname are dying to link their proprietary software to our 
kdepim libraries. I would definitely prefer GPL-licensed libraries even 
if there were closed-source people longing for our libraries. But maybe 
that's just because I don't think LGPLing all our libraries will do 
Free Software a good service.

One of our main goal in KDE is to advance/foster/promote/bring forward 
Free Software. We don't do this by allowing producers of proprietary 
closed-source software to use our work for free (as in beer). Software 
producers are thick so we have to hit them with the clue-bat. They will 
either grok it and release their software as Free Software or they will 
have to use alternative libraries.</rant>

Maybe we should simply create a kdepimlibs-gpl module (or a 
libkdepim-gpl in kdepimlibs) for collecting all those nice little 
classes we want to share among ourselves (and other Free Software 
hackers) but that are not worth the pain asking everybody and his dog 
whether they are okay with relicensing. This would make our and in 
particular Tom's life so much easier. Instead of spending hours and 
hours tracking down authors of code he wants to re-use, he could simply 
re-use the code without having to ask anybody (which is one of the 
freedoms Free Software gives us) and spend the remaining hours making 
other improvements to mailody (or porting it to KDE 4).

> > Ok, here's my answer: the servertest stuff is crap. It abuses the
> > info channel to the kioslaves to report back capabilities. I don't
> > want this to be alive by KDE4, so no, I don't agree to the
> > relicensing. Write something that doesn't suck from scratch :)
>
> Thanks for the help and taking the time to educate me on the right
> solution.

I wonder what the alternative would be? Using an additional D-BUS 
connection between the kioslave and the application instead? Not using 
kioslaves at all?

Regards,
Ingo
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