Re: Comments on proposal for revised license policy

On Thursday 13 September 2007 00:37, Alex Merry wrote:
> On Wednesday 12 Sep 2007, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
> > Maybe it would be good to specify the exact format here, something
> > like "Copyright (c) 2007 Cornelius Schumacher <[email protected]>".
>
> Good idea, but without the (c).

We currently use it all of the place and it does no harm. But you are probably 
right, that we should get rid of it at least for new code as it has no legal 
meaning.

> > I think we have to define "library in kdelibs" a bit better. What
> > about "library with a public API which is part of the KDE Developer
> > Platform (i.e. in the SVN modules kdesupport, kdelibs or
> > kdepimlibs)"? Should we add public libraries of other modules here as
> > well?
>
> Yes, I think this is a good idea, but we should mention that kdepimlibs
> has an exception rule (-gpl suffix for libraries given a special
> exemption - see the POLICIES doc in kdepimlibs).

Yes, that's right.

> This should be a quote.  Basically, your header should say:
>
> This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
> modify it under the terms of the GNU Library General Public
> License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
> version 2 of the License, or version 3 of the License, or, at the
> discretion of KDE e.v. (which shall act as a proxy as in section
> 14 of version 3 of the License), any later version.
>
> Or you can just put "either version 2 of the License, or (at your
> option) and later version".

Shouldn't the first paragraph also include an "at your option"? So this would 
basically mean that the libs are multiply licenses, right?

> > We should probably also ask us the question, if we want to phase out
> > (L)GPL version 2 and go for version 3 (or later) only. I guess this
> > is more a political question than a legal one, but other projects go
> > this road, so for us it's at least an option.
>
> I think we should wait for TT to make a move before we think about that.
> If they go v3 only, there's not much point requiring v2 to be an
> option.

Well, if we have an opinion on that it might influence what Trolltech is doing 
quite a bit.

-- 
Cornelius Schumacher <[email protected]>