Policy for contributions to www.kde.org

[Waldo Bastian]

On Thursday 30 January 2003 13:16, Harri Porten wrote:
> But won't it be the simplest to state at *one* places what kind of license
> (or licences) the whole content of www.kde.org falls under and make that
> a policy for authors ? Attributing this to e.g. every image sounds like a
> lot of work. After all Dirk's worry wasn't about the licence situation of
> the *user* (who downloads content) but the community of *authors* (i.e.
> KDE). If a free license is part of CVS policy it would have to be accepted
> by everybody checking in anything.

I don't think such "implied" licenses work very well. I have seen code in KDE 
CVS without a license header that suddenly got stamped with a mickey-mouse 
BSD-ish license by its author. (Grep for "Alex Z") Apart from that I think it 
creates the impression that all files are indeed under a certain license even 
while in fact the actual copyright holder never gave his/her permission for 
that. Think of the company logos that are in CVS and that are most likely 
"All rights reserved".

That said, I agree with you that having only one acceptable license would the 
simplest. It's just that I think that every file should state its license if 
you actually want to be able to claim rights based on that license.

Cheers,
Waldo
-- 
bastian at kde.org -=|[ SuSE, The Linux Desktop Experts ]|=- bastian at suse.com