FLA

[Cornelius Schumacher]

On Thursday 06 February 2003 16:57, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> On Thursday 06 February 2003 16:31, Ralf Nolden wrote:
> > 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.
>
> I think it leads to a very murky licensing situation when people include
> GPL licensed code in code that is licensed "GPL+Qt-exception". That either
> constitutes unlawfull relicensing and/or the exception part is void from
> that point on. Given the average (lack of) licensing-awareness of KDE
> contributors, I think this is bound to create problems down the road
> because of the lack of distinction between GPL and GPL+Qt-exception.

The "GPL+Qt-Exception" licence works around the problem that Qt isn't 
considered a system library. That this makes it impossible to include GPL 
licenced code is a pity, but we have to live with that.

> Instead of GPL+Qt-exception it might be clearer to use QPL or BSD instead.

This wouldn't fit the intentions of all developers (at least it wouldn't fit 
mine). Both the QPL and the BSD licence have some siginificant disadvantages 
compared to the GPL.

I think we should add a standard "GPL+Qt-exception" licence to the licences on 
developer.kde.org and use that were appropriate. If KDE developers 
licensing-awareness isn't sufficient to make correct usage of these licences 
we should work on improving the licencing-awareness instead of making 
compromises with the licencing itself.

-- 
Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher@kde.org>