Licenses for Beta 3

killerfox monsieur.goatse at gmail.com
Fri May 22 22:01:29 UTC 2009


Since Beta3 is being tagged this weekend we should come to a final agreement 
on the list of default licenses to ship with KDevelop.

Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> On 22.05.09 13:17:45, Jakob Petsovits wrote:
>> On Thursday 21 May 2009, Killerfox wrote:
>>> On Thursday 21 May 2009 01:06:00 pm Jakob Petsovits wrote:
>>>>>  A             codegen/licenses/GPL v1
>>>> (...)
>>>>
>>>> Er, really? GPL v1? I thought that one is long obsolete and replaced by
>>>> v2 in pretty much all cases. Are you sure this is suitable for shipping
>>>> by default?
>>> Well technically v2 is obsolete as well, replaced by v3. However a lot of
>>> software still uses it. I don't think there is an issue with providing it,
>>> in the end it is the user's choice.
>> That's not quite the same though. v3 is not only an update but also comes 
with 
>> a set of new restrictions (the DRM stuff) which caused a "philosophical" 
issue 
>> with the v2→v3 migration. On the other hand, the v1→v2 migration was 
>> uncontroversial and happened a long time ago (1991?), so you'll hardly find 
>> any projects anymore using v1, or anyone still suggesting it as a license.
>>
>> Of course it's the user's choice, but then again the user could also choose 
to 
>> use CDDL (which is in fact an improved Mozilla license, so maybe it should 
>> replace the MPL in this set), Affero GPL, CC-SA, Artistic, Eclipse Public 
>> License, IBM Public License, Microsoft Public License, plain public domain, 
>> PHP or Perl licenses, WTFPL, or whatever licenses are out there.
>>
>> I think the default choice should be a sensible, well-selected set of most 
>> commonly used and widely accepted licenses. That is true for GPL v2 and 
v3, 
>> but certainly not for GPL v1.
>>
>> Also, any specific reason why Apache v1 is included instead of the improved 
and 
>> GPL-compatible v2? Where is LGPL v3? And what makes the Boost license 
special 
>> that it is included as only project-specific license in the set? Isn't the 
>> official name for the MIT license "MIT X11" (because there are other MIT 
>> licenses too)?
>>
>> I don't want to sound harsh (in fact, having a few licenses for pre-
selection 
>> does rock) but the imported selection looks a bit random to me. If it is 
>> actually intended for guiding the user to an appropriate license, I think 
the 
>> current choice is not yet an ideal one.
> 
> I agree with Jakob in that we should provide a sensible list of default
> licenses that are "suggested" to be used. So how about collecting a list.
> I'll make a start with the obvious ones I can come up from the top of my
> head:
> 
> - GPL v2
> - GPL v3
> - LGPL v2
> - LGPL v3
> - MIT X11
> - BSD
> - EPL
> - CDDL
> - Apache v2
> 
> Eventually we could add the kde-used "(L)GPL v2 or later" and "(L)GPL v2 or 
later
> as approved by KDE e.V." (after all we're a KDE app, right?)?




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