FW: Company usage of Kleopatra

[Andre Heinecke]

Hi Dhivyai,

On Thursday, 30 November 2023 10:02:24 CET Ben Cooksley wrote:
> Thanks for reaching out to us regarding the licensing of Kleopatra.

To be honest I find it a bit annoying that you work for a large company and 
write to two Mailing Lists regarding a legal question where a look in the 
about dialog would have answered your question. 

> There are no separate terms for the use of any KDE software, including
> Kleopatra.
> All our software is licensed equally to all persons regardless of who they
> are, and is free of charge.
> 
> Depending on who you are obtaining your copies of Kleopatra from though
> they may (as a distributor) charge fees however that is unrelated to us.

This is true, but since many people may ask why there is also a commercial 
distribution of Kleopatra (GnuPG VS-Desktop) let me explain a bit further. I 
think that is also where the question may come from.
We publish the same Software (in a bit different Versions as GnuPG VS-Desktop 
uses some different branches) also free of charge as Gpg4win or for Linux the 
GnuPG AppImage.

But companies (or Governments), often times require a supplier for legal 
reasons. e.g. if you want to use us with restricted documents you need someone 
that is a "supplier" of the software. So that someone is responsible for 
Support, Security Updates and even just normal "Bugs".

So we at gnupg.com (Where I work for) take the responsibility, give support, 
work with the approval agencies and so on and so forth and charge you "Support 
license" fees. 

That way we can finance the development of GnuPG, Kleopatra and some others 
things and keep everything completely free as in freedom. The only thing that 
is not free is our brand name "GnuPG VS-Desktop" everything else you can 
compile for yourself and there is no open core / proprietary patches or 
anything that is not licensed under GPL terms 🥳


Best Regards,
Andre

-- 
GnuPG.com - a brand of g10 Code, the GnuPG experts.

g10 Code GmbH, Erkrath/Germany, AG Wuppertal HRB14459
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Vorstand: W.Koch, B.Reiter, A.Heinecke        Mail: board at gnupg.org
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