Re: KDE/kdelibs/kdeui

On Tuesday 11 September 2007, Alex Merry wrote:
> [Sorry, Rafael, for the duplicate: I meant to send this to the list as
> well]
>
> On Tuesday 11 Sep 2007, Rafael Fernández López wrote:
> > Hey,
> >
> > And what about this ? :
> >
> > http://trolltech.com/products/qt/gplexception
> >
> >
> > "GNU Library or "Lesser"
> >  General Public License (LGPL) "

...

> You are not linking to the licensed software here, you are modifying and
> redistributing it.  You could license the file as GPL + this exception,
> but not as LGPL.  And that violates the kdelibs licensing policy.

that is correct. the exceptions on Qt are for code that links to it, not to Qt 
itself.

as i understand it: 

if the code was indeed copied from Qt, you either need to reimplement the code 
or get permission to relicense it. reimplementation is probably the more 
realistic approach. you can keep the API (which are not protectable in the 
same way implementations are) but you would need to rewrite the actual code 
itself. probably the safest way to do that is to have someone else fill in 
the methods without looking at what is there right now. not fun, either way.

however, i just looked at the code for both classes, the one in Qt and 
Rafael's, and they seem to be significantly different in many areas. there 
are certainly some commonalities, but then there are only so many ways of 
doing something.

it's also probably relevant whether Rafael copied the code and modified it 
from there (making it a derivative) or if he read the code in Qt and used it 
as a source of implementation ideas as he wrote his own implementation.

in any case, the comment in the licensing header is not appropriate and needs 
to be removed, either because it doesn't belong in the first place (e.g. it 
wasn't a copy-n-paste job) or because the code is rewritten such that it 
satisfies those requirements.

IANAL, of course. =)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech

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