Voting rights - the GNOME way

[Rob Kaper]

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On Friday 22 November 2002 23:27, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> 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".

Well, there's an unwritten policy now for most issues. I think there would be 
plenty of critisism on the lists objecting to an application called 
Koka-Cola. In fact, I changed KMonop to Atlantik because of input received on 
the lists about the possible trademark issues.

In practice, things in KDE already get done by majority consensus, without 
true voting. For more controversial issues, the opinion of active developers 
or more experienced/credited/active developers does seem to take preference 
though. That might be beneficial in most cases, but not all. But the same 
applies to voting.

The only problem with this is when a valid technical/organizational complaint 
is made which is not heard or acknowledged by the majority. Conversation and 
argumentation skills, as well as "karma", are very important here.

Hopefully this list can provide some ideas on settling those issues.

> 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.

If people object to the contents of that policy, they should object vocally. I 
realize that there is something as the vocal minority and silent majority, 
but open source projects cannot represent those who do not speak up. The 
entire development model is based on participation -- either by code or 
ideas.
 
That said, do you mind if I add the LGPL for an optional license for libraries 
outside of kdelibs? There is probably LGPL stuff in libkdenetwork / 
libkdegames / libwhatever and that should be fine. The reason I ask is 
because Atlantik's libraries are LGPL, which is not explicitely okay by the 
policy. In fact, I use LGPL 2.1 explicitely (while kdelibs/COPYING.LIB is 
LGPL 2, not 2.1) and don't include "or any later version" in my code/header 
headers.

Rob
- -- 
Rob Kaper     | Gimme some love, gimme some skin,
cap@capsi.com | if we ain't got that then we ain't got much
www.capsi.com | and we ain't got nothing, nothing! -- "Nothing" by A
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