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List:       kde-licensing
Subject:    Re: KDE and GPLv3
From:       Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher () kde ! org>
Date:       2008-01-29 21:57:03
Message-ID: 200801292257.03313.schumacher () kde ! org
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Hi Brett,

On Monday 28 January 2008 19:14:11 Brett Smith wrote:
> My name is Brett Smith; I handle various license-related issues for the
> Free Software Foundation.  With the recent release of Qt under GPLv3,
> I've been looking to learn more about KDE's own license plans -- just so
> I have a sense of how things stand for the major users of the GPL.  I'm
> not here to tell you to do things a certain way or anything like that;
> I'm just looking for information.

We appreciate your interest. As licensing is such a complex topic we are also 
always glad about well-informed input.

> I saw the page on your Wiki about efforts to make sure that all the
> other code in KDE could be upgraded to GPLv3, and I'm glad to see that
> that's apparently going well.  I was wondering: do you know if KDE
> itself is expecting to upgrade to GPLv3 relatively soon?  And is that
> likely going to happen all at once in the KDE universe, or will various
> different components and applications change at different times?

The KDE e.V., the formal organization behind the KDE project recently has 
decided with a big majority about an updated licensing policy 
(http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy) by a vote of its members. 
The policy basically makes sure that it's possible to write both GPLv2 and 
GPLv3 programs for KDE.

As there is no central copyright holder for KDE, it's not likely that there 
will be license changes for big parts of the code at the same time. Now that 
Qt also is GPLv3 licensed, I would expect that GPLv3 third party applications 
will come up. But due to the big number of available applications and the 
large codebase there always will be a mixture of various licenses be in use.

> I'd appreciate any information you can provide.

If you have more questions please don't hesitate to ask.

-- 
Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher@kde.org>
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