Krita source & library layout reorganization

[Bart Coppens]

On Thursday 04 August 2005 14:09, Clarence Dang wrote:
> One thing I keep forgetting to bring up: You need to double check the
> licenses of some of the files you intend to put in your core image library.
>  From memory, some of them are either GPL or QPL, not LGPL.  This is bad
> for closed source apps and also BSD licensed programs such as KolourPaint. 
> One piece of code that comes to mind was either the tablet or smooth
> painting patch which was derived from QPL code but there was more.
I am not a lawyer (so don't believe a word from what I say on licensing 
issues, etc.), but from what I understand, this is not really an issue for 
any BSD-style Qt application since it will link to a GPLed Qt library (and 
from what remember BSD-style licenses should normally be GPL compatible). 
Pure QPL pieces are not so fine since from what I remember it isn't really 
GPL-compatible. But since X11 Qt is dual-licensed QPL/GPL it hopefully won't 
matter if we switch licenses there.
For commercial/closed source software this is however more a problem. The 
question we must ask though, is if we would actually want commercial and/or 
binary plugins and extensions for Krita. I believe it would be a bad idea 
because it would require more care for backward compatibility, ABI issues, 
etc. I don't think we're ready for that yet. As for the future, I still 
believe more in a GPL license for the entire of Krita, but that's a personal 
view of course. There's a nice paper by RMS on this:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html
For the BSD/QPL issues, it may be worth investigating those further. I 
remember there being a kde-legal mailinglist, but I have no idea if that's an 
active list or so.

Bart Coppens