FLA

[Ralf Nolden]

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On Donnerstag, 6. Februar 2003 15:39, Marc Mutz wrote:
> On Thursday 06 February 2003 14:23, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> <snip>
>
> > I don't think KDE e.v. is currently equiped to handle such situation
> > either. If you look at how long it takes to get anywhere with the
> > trademark registration...
> >
> > If you are concerned about enforcement of your license then I think
> > that assigning your copyright to the FSF is a more viable
> > alternative. At least at this point in time.
>
> <snip>
>
> But at the point in time when KDE e.V. is ready to handle this, we'd get
> the same problem again: Everyone has to re-contract with the KDE e.V.
>
> I'd instead propose to contract with the KDE e.V. and let the e.V.
> choose who _actually_ handles this. This could be the FSFE, this is
> allowed by the FLA (at least that's my reading of paragraph 4).

Reading over all current comments on this matter, I was about to propose the 
same. Why not assign it to the e.V. and the e.V. handles over the legal 
proposition to the FSFE until further notice from the e.V. that it can handle 
such challenges alone ? (and even then I think that it's better to only have 
one comitee, the FSFE, to be the representant in court for any of such cases 
because they will have the means and the experience to handle such cases in 
the future by cases which don't necessarily have to be connected to KDE 
code).

Regarding the general policy of KDE code, I'm not aware of a public statement 
of licensing either. Until now we just said, uh, oh, any license that fits 
gnu.org's listed ones. This left out two important things: easy tracking of 
licensing violations by authors submitting code to KDE; we had more than one 
case already where either the license in the code had exception clauses, 
missing license statement or for instance plugin interfaces in kivio who 
caused trouble due to their licensing. About the Qt exception clause I'm sure 
that it would do quite good in making KDE available as native Windows or Mac 
programs and enlarge the influence of free software distribution widely, but 
at the amount of people who by political reasons reject to add this clause to 
their code it seems to be even more unlikely to get everyone to agree to add 
this clause.

To simplify the whole matter I think a proposal should be formed about what we 
think is the best way for anyone to write software that gets distributed 
through KDE with regard to the licensing. Generally that would be:

libraries and plugin interfaces: LGPL  (don't know how much kparts are 
affected as they are loaded on demand into the program. How does a kpart need 
to be treated in that respect that a commercial program can load a kpart also 
?)

applications: GPL

Note, this should be an advisory, not a "You have to if you want to contribute 
to KDE". 

The submission of the legal treatment of the copyright through KDE e.V. (which 
hands it over to FSFE effectively in commission) to be addded to the license 
header.

Does anything speak against this advisory to write up a license header that we 
would like to see but don't enforce developers to use  and publish it on 
www.kde.org + kde-core-devel + kde-devel to ask people to make use of it if 
they think this fits to their ideas of writing free software within KDE ?

Ralf


>
> Marc

- -- 
We're not a company, we just produce better code at less costs.
- --------------------------------------------------------------------
Ralf Nolden
nolden@kde.org

The K Desktop Environment       The KDevelop Project
http://www.kde.org              http://www.kdevelop.org
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