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List:       kroupware
Subject:    Re: Re: [Kroupware] kroupware - kde 3.2 ??
From:       Matthias Kalle Dalheimer <kalle () klaralvdalens-datakonsult ! se>
Date:       2002-11-06 10:04:21
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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 the
> > > > kde cvs and put it under a KDE accepted license?
> > >
> > > It has a KDE-accepted license, the GPL. We can't put the maintenance 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 other
> KOrganizer code does allow that. It is a requirement that all KOrganizer
> 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 adds
> something to the code, but is not willing to put the additional code under
> this licence, the code can't go back to the original version. This would
> mean that the code had to be forked and the KDE version would most probably
> 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 lost
> later or prevent other fixes from the original version to go back to the
> 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 responsibly
> 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 for 
almost two years, without problems. The only changes that have been made 
where one liner get-this-to-compile-on-platform-X changes which are not 
copyrightable anyway.

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

Kalle


-- 
Matthias Kalle Dalheimer
President & CEO
Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB
Platform-independent software solutions

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