On Wednesday 06 November 2002 10.18, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
> On Tuesday 05 November 2002 17:46, konold@erfrakon.de wrote:
> > On Tue, 5 Nov 2002, Matthias Kalle Dalheimer wrote:
> > > > Kalle: Is it fine with you to move the gantt maintainance into th=
e
> > > > kde cvs and put it under a KDE accepted license?
> > >
> > > It has a KDE-accepted license, the GPL. We can't put the maintenanc=
e of
> > > the original version into the KDE CVS. However, KDChart in
> > > koffice/kchart/kdchart has been maintained like this for almost two
> > > years now, and nobody has ever complained, it has worked fine for
> > > everybody. So there is no issue with that.
> >
> > I think Kalles reasoning is fine. Can you accept his answer?
>
> There are two problems with the licence:
> - It doesn't allow linking against non-GPL versions of Qt. All the othe=
r
> KOrganizer code does allow that. It is a requirement that all KOrganize=
r
> code (including the libraries) allows that.

See my other mail, I have no problem with adding that.

> - The library also has a commercial licence. That means, if somebody ad=
ds
> something to the code, but is not willing to put the additional code un=
der
> this licence, the code can't go back to the original version. This woul=
d
> mean that the code had to be forked and the KDE version would most prob=
ably
> not get any fixes from the original version anymore.
>
> The problem with maintenance is that the library violates the rule that
> code in the KDE CVS has to actively be maintained in the KDE CVS. If we
> can't change the code in KDE CVS without risking that the changes get l=
ost
> later or prevent other fixes from the original version to go back to th=
e
> KDE CVS, it might hinder development.
>
> These are my concerns. I could live with the commercial licence and the
> maintenance issue, at least for now, because I trust Kalle to responsib=
ly
> handle these issues, although I would be more happy, if the lib wouldn'=
t
> need any exceptional handling. But the problem with non-GPL Qt versions=
 has
> to be resolved.

As I said, KChart with our KDChart engine has lived with this situation f=
or=20
almost two years, without problems. The only changes that have been made=20
where one liner get-this-to-compile-on-platform-X changes which are not=20
copyrightable anyway.

If somebody wants to make a substantial contribution to either KDChart or=
=20
KDGantt, we would contact this developer and offer him or her to buy the=20
rights to the change so that we can continue to have identical GPL and=20
commercial versions. I am not too sure that this is going to happen, thou=
gh,=20
as hacking on these is a pretty tough call, both have many hundreds (KDCh=
art=20
even thousands) of design and implementation hours, it's nothing you can =
get=20
into on one weekend...

Kalle


--=20
Matthias Kalle Dalheimer
President & CEO
Klar=E4lvdalens Datakonsult AB
Platform-independent software solutions

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