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List:       kde-licensing
Subject:    Re: Using libunrar in KArchive?
From:       Ingo =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Kl=F6cker?= <kloecker () kde ! org>
Date:       2014-03-28 18:55:46
Message-ID: 63464572.pyXg5qqVoQ () thufir ! ingo-kloecker ! de
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On Thursday 27 March 2014 13:51:48 David Faure wrote:
> On Thursday 27 March 2014 12:36:52 Sune Vuorela wrote:
> > On 2014-03-27, David Faure <faure@kde.org> wrote:
> > > Do you think it would be possibly to make karchive optionally
> > > depend on libunrar, for *extracting* rar files (with no support
> > > for creating rar files)?
> > > 
> > > The license for libunrar has limitations, but AFAICS only "do not
> > > recreate the compression algorithm", so if we don't do that,
> > > would it be a problem?
> > 
> > It would be code that none of the big distributions would ship, so
> > I'm not sure it would be that ... useful.
> 
> OK. Since I will write this code anyway (a customer needs it), this
> only leaves one question - is it ok to put it in karchive anyway?

What do you mean by "put it in karchive"? As the cited Fedora page says 
the license is GPL-incompatible. You cannot link GPL code together with 
any parts of unrar's source code. Calling the unrar executable from 
karchive should be okay though.

Leaving those technical details aside, the unrar license does not meet 
the requirements of our licensing policy 
(http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy). Consequently, I 
don't see how we can allow it in our repositories.


> As
> you say the distros will not provide the optional dependency so it
> won't be compiled, but having the code in there in the first place
> isn't a problem, right?

Au contraire. IMHO putting it in any of our repositories is a huge 
problem. If we allow this code in our repositories then we set a 
precedent for allowing any source code with non-free licenses in our 
repositories.


> The alternative is to host the code elsewhere (playground, github...)
> but that makes it harder (I might need access to karchive_p.h).

I don't see an alternative to hosting it outside of KDE's repositories.


Regards,
Ingo

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