Update to KDE Licence Policy
Jonathan Riddell <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.kde.licensing |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
KDE's Licence Policy is out of date, not only with GPL 3 but also QPL and FDL. http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy So I'd like to propose that we support GPL 3 and update the policy. GPL 3 is a useful tool against two of the biggest threats against free software, patents and DRM. We should even have a formal policy against software patents soon, and working towards GPL 3 would be putting words into action. We also will find ourselves unable to use newer versions of our dependencies very soon, libsmbclient comes to mind but others will likely follow, and distributions will have a hard time having to package two versions of the same library. Of course we can't move staight to GPL 3, firstly Qt is GPL 2 only, so we should ask the KDE Free Qt Foundation to discuss with Trolltech moving Qt to GPL 2 or 3. I'm unclear on the current status of Trolltech licence changes but I know they plan changes so this could be part of that move. The other problem is much of our code is GPL 2 only (also LGPL 2 only, but that doesn't matter as it can upgrade to GPL 2 or above). So I propose we change the our policy to say that all newly entered GPL code must be "version 2 or 3 or later versions approved by KDE e.V.". There will then be the task of chasing up as many GPL 2 only copyright holders as possible and persuading them to change it to 2 or 3. The changes to the licence policy would be, drop allowing QPL, I expect Trolltech will drop this licence altogether at some point. Change GPL to "2, 3 or later approved by e.V.". Change LGPL to "2, 2.1, 3 or later versions approved by KDE e.V." Finally require all documentation to be under the GNU FDL 1.2 or later versions approved by KDE e.V., requiring FDL is already unwritten policy as far as I can tell. Documentation can optionally also be under one of the acceptable software licences. Jonathan