From koffice Mon Jun 26 22:09:50 2000 From: Rudiger Koch Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2000 22:09:50 +0000 To: koffice Subject: Re: licensing issues with kword X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=koffice&m=96206340804387 Hi all, let me describe the position of Kaiwal Software (Shane)Co. Ltd. to this topic: At Mon, 26 Jun 2000, David Faure wrote: > On Mon, Jun 26, 2000 at 09:37:54AM -0400, Emmanuel Touzery wrote: > > Hello, > > > > i have a question about kword licensing. it's released under the > > GPL, but the partnership with Kaiwal Software will allow GPL and > > LGPL contributions. So this partership seems to affect the licensing of > > kword. I am wrong? > Hmm, kword is partly LGPL (kdelibs, koffice libs, filters) and partly GPL. > How does partnership with anyone change that ? We're not free with the selection of the license anyway since most will be "derived code", hence it'll be under the GPL or LGPL, dependent of what the original code is. > (Who's Kaiwal ?) That's us (www.kaiwal.com). We are a Thai Linux distributor. We signed an agreement with TheKompany.com about sponsoring two fulltime developers for two years of dedicated KWord development, remember? Our intention is to improve KWord, that's it. Since most of KWord is LGPL already, improving on those files will result in LGPLed code. Kaiwal does not intend to get involved in the current licensing discussion that is going on about weather it is legal to distribute GPLed code that depends on QT together with QT or not. Personally I do believe that licensing KOffice and KDE under a different, but very GPLish license is a great idea to end that really annoying licensing quarrel, however. If the KOffice team ever makes licensing a topic and decides to go with a different license we'll be fine with that, too. The purpose of stating that our code will be under some GNU license was to make clear that we have no intention to do weird and proprietary things with licenses. Kaiwal's motivation to provide manpower to the project is simply that we need a powerful office suite that is easily adaptable to the special requirements of the Thai alphabet. Neither StarOffice nor Corel Office nor Applix is really suitable. Greetings -Rudiger