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List:       kde-licensing
Subject:    KDE2.0 license change
From:       Stefan Westerfeld <stefan () space ! twc ! de>
Date:       2000-01-08 17:35:41
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   Hi!

[
I am no lawyer, so this is worth nothing as legal advice, and I don't like
licensing discussions either, but I'd like to have KDE2.0 shipped with every
distribution, including Debian.
]

The GPL - at least after the interpretation Debian and the GNU people are
suggesting - is a pure copyleft license.

This means: you may not link GPLd programs to anything that is not as "free"
as GPL is. To put it in another way: if you have a GPLd program then the
only thing you may link it to is

a) code that is GPLd
b) code that could be GPLd (e.g. public domain code - you may place a GPL
   license on that)

However this (what people advertise as 100% pure copyleft) means that you
may not link a GPLd program to Qt, as Qt is under QPL, which fulfills neither
a) nor b).

This fact leads as a practical consequence to the fact that debian won't
include KDE2.0 as it is (due to licensing), though QPL is much "nicer" than
the old Qt licensing.

Well, that is what I found on the web towards this issue (though not really
up-to-date):

  http://www.debian.org/News/1998/19981008.en.html
  http://www.uk.debian.org/~phil/KDE-FAQ.html

For those reasons, the options to fix that problem for KDE2.0 and all later
versions are:

a) the trolls could change QPL to allow converting to GPL at any point in
   time or similar (like LGPL)... well, but probably forget that solution ;)

b) let the source under GPL, but add a notice (for instance to the place in
   the headers where it says ...is under GNU GPL v2...), that we explicitely
   allow linking against Qt

c) convert everything to LGPL (which would allow linking to every
   "proprietary" software, not only against the QPLd and opensourced Qt)

GPL means GNU General Public License and if the GNU people intend it to work
like 100% pure copyleft, we should respect that.

So if we mean to license KDE2.0 different than that interpretation of the GPL
we should either tell it explicitely (b), or choose another license (c).

We could ask every developer that actively works on the KDE2.0 tree, publish
our decision on the web and tell all other people that we'll of course throw
their code out if they are not happy with our new licensing.

However, it may mean to rewrite the i18n stuff, if we don't get permission to
use it under non-pure-GPL. (Which is what we may want anyway if we want people
to i18n commercial apps the develop against kdelibs). This dependance on GPLd
i18n also seems to be the reason why debian didn't even include the LGPLd
kdelibs.

  Cu... Stefan

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