Voting rights - the GNOME way

Sat, 23 Nov 2002 16:10:42 +0300

On Saturday 23 November 2002 1:27 am, Waldo Bastian wrote:
|  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."

This is obviously _very good_ example why we should have KDE policy in place.

Another example when somethinglike this is needed was Mosfet with Liquid.

|
|  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".

Agreed.

|
|  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.

Hmm.  I should ask anyone a question here:  do we want KDE to be inline with 
GPL?  I see several benefits of GPL'ed code (like: you can't hide code for 
your program if it uses GPL'ed code), but it also creates some frustration of 
potential users coming form "traditional" companies.
Therefor, BSD-like license is much better in cases when you want adoption for 
your project.

Also:  how much of code (or data) do we want to share with other projects?
Latest discussion about SVG (librsvg vs. KSVG, etc.) and GStreamer 
demonstrated that there is significant number of KDE developers who *do not 
want* to reuse code from othe rprojects, and prefer to domost of the work 
theirself.
To make clear:  that's fine with me.
But what should KDE Policy say about it in general?

Cheers,
-- 

Vadim Plessky
SVG Icons
http://svgicons.sourceforge.net
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