Voting rights - the GNOME way

[Simon Hausmann]

On Sat, Nov 23, 2002 at 04:10:42PM +0300, Vadim Plessky wrote:
> |  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.

I think it neither makes sense or do I think it's possible to
restrict outselves to the GPL only, also given that we have so much
other licensed code already. The main point is that contributions
should be made under the terms of at least free software. Even less
restrictive licenses like the BSD license should be allowed, and in
fact they are. I think the licensing document Waldo made up is
excellent (I'd even say perfect :)

> 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?

Do you have a suggestion for a concrete policy?

My opinion is that this can only be expressed in a very very weak
policy, probably not giving a real effect.


Simon