Voting rights - the GNOME way

[Simon Hausmann]

On Sun, Nov 24, 2002 at 02:21:32PM +0300, Vadim Plessky wrote:
> On Saturday 23 November 2002 5:32 pm, Simon Hausmann wrote:
> |  On Sat, Nov 23, 2002 at 04:10:42PM +0300, Vadim Plessky wrote:
> [...]
> |
> |  > 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.
> 
> I think system-level libraries should be under BSD license, or compatible with 
> such license (MIT/X11?).
> (Note: I do not speak about KDE libs here, it seems kdelibs and Qt can/should 
> be treated as :higher-level libs" here)
> 
> As I have seen, for example, on FreeType-devel mailing list, there is a lot of 
> companies using some open-source libs.
> And those companies affraid to use LGPL code, in particular
> (check, for example, mail on this from Paul Pedriana, from Maxis)
> 
> Therefor, a very important question comes to my mind here:
> What about Qt?
> As QT is GPL'ed on X11 platform, it restricts usage of other software built on 
> that library, too (in particular: KDE/kdelibs)

Which restrictions in particular are you thinking of?

> And I believe that some parts of KDE/kdelibs should be reusable by commercial 
> companies.

Which parts of kdelibs do you think cannot be used for commercial
software development against kdelibs components?

> Therefor, I have proposal/question:
> what about moving some parts of Qt outside of "main Qt tree" (making them 
> modules?) and re-licensing them under BSD license?

Err, I think this is beyond our control. Trolltech owns the Qt
source code. It's not that we can just relicense parts of it.

> It's nice that Qt3 has XML parsr, but wouldn't it better if it would be 
> available outside a whole Qt tree, with BSD-like license?
> Than there would be no reason to use libxml2 or expat.

Maybe it would be nice, but

 a) it uses Qt types/containers, so it's kind of hard to make it
 separate as-is. And I think the very point that it uses Qt types
 makes it much more re-usable for within KDE, makes it more
 attractive than libxml2.

 b) you should ask Trolltech about relicensing that code to a BSD
 license, but I wouldn't be too optimistic ;)


Simon