Cervisia again, plus greater problems

[Ben Burton]

Hi -- I tried to CC this to the kdevelop list but incorrectly used
@lists.kde.org.  Resending to the correct place; please CC any replies
to me since I'm not on kdevelop-devel. - Ben.

----- Forwarded message from Ben Burton <bab at debian.org> -----

From: Ben Burton <bab at debian.org>
To: kde-core-devel at kde.org
Cc: kdevelop-devel at kde.org, 296514 at bugs.debian.org,
	christian.loose at hamburg.de, bernd at mail.berlios.de,
	woebbeking at web.de, quanta-devel at kde.org
Subject: Cervisia again, plus greater problems


Hi,

It's me writing about Cervisia licensing again.  We still haven't heard
back from Bernd Gehrmann at this stage, which means there's not really
much that we can do.  AFAICT he hasn't been around for a few years now;
does anyone know of a way that we might be able to contact him?  I've
already tried a few other email addresses but to no avail.

(For those who missed the initial post:
http://lists.kde.org/?t=110929888600001&r=1&w=2 )

On further examination, there does also seem to be a greater worry regarding
the QPL licensing, which is other GPLed applications that use cervisia.
I had initially thought that this was not a problem, since the
cvsservice that sits beneath cervisia is LGPLed (this is why I didn't
mention this issue earlier).  However, further examination shows that
the cervisia kpart does in fact contain a fair amount of QPLed code.

Given that the QPL is GPL-incompatible, this raises issues for GPLed
programs that wish to use this kpart.  I believe this at least includes
quanta and kdevelop (unless I'm mistaken).

It would seem to me then that the current options are:

(i) try harder to get in touch with Bernd Gehrmann, or
(ii) alter the kdevelop and quanta licenses to explicitly allow
use of the QPLed cervisia part.

Though IMHO (i) would be preferable, since (ii) involves many more
people and still raises issues for any other GPLed code that kdevelop
and/or quanta might be linked with.

CCing the kdevelop and kdewebdev lists also.

Ben.