Voting rights - the GNOME way

[Waldo Bastian]

On Friday 22 November 2002 20:00, Vadim Plessky wrote:
> I see some problems with "assigning  voting rights".
> Let's suppose, for example, that both you and me have voting rights (about
> KDE future/policy, etc.), and we voted *for* decision "KDE should support
> CSS3". And than Dirk Mueller comes and says: "guys! you want CSS3?  Code it
> on your own. I don't want to spend my time on that crap"
> //  I used Dirk's name just as na example, I don't know his opinion on
> CSS3. So what?  We maid decision to get CSS3 in, and nobody would work on
> it.

Well, those things sort themselves out. But take trademarks for example, 
someone makes an application named koca-cola and puts it in CVS. I think that 
would put KDE at an unacceptable risk for being sued over trademark 
infringment, but the author of koca_cola says "fuck them, I don't care, and I 
don't want to rename my application."

So what happens?

Such situations can be handled much more gracefully if KDE has adopted a 
policy that states "KDE developers should take reasonable measures to ensure 
that application names do not infringe on trademarks." Because then, when 
someone says "fuck you, I don't care", you are in a position to point to the 
policy and say, "but we do".

An example is http://developer.kde.org/documentation/licensing/policy.html and 
kshred. kshred had a licence that some people consider to be 
GPL-incompatible. However, the author thinks it is GPL-compatible. You can  
discuss for ages about such licensing issues but this time you can point to 
the above URL and things can be settled rather quickly.

Now, http://developer.kde.org/documentation/licensing/policy.html exists 
because I wrote it and so far not too many people seem to disagree with it, 
but I don't think that is a proper way to make decisions that potentially 
affect many KDE developers.

Cheers,
Waldo