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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: licensing issues with kword
From:       Rudiger Koch <rkoch () kaiwal ! com>
Date:       2000-06-26 22:09:50
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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

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