Re: Relicensing KioFuse from GPLv2+ to LGPLv2+

--- Kevin Ottens <[email protected]> wrote:
> Le dimanche 30 septembre 2007, Vlad a écrit :
> > I'm working to port KioFuse to KDE4 with the hope that it will be
> > incorporated into kdelibs. According to the KDE licensing policy
> > (http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy), code residing
> in
> > kdelibs must be licensed as LGPL or a more permissive license. You
> > (Alexander Neundorf and Kévin 'ervin' Ottens) hold copyright on
> the
> > following files in KioFuse:
> > [...]
> > Thank you very much for your consideration,
> 
> Well, I'm not against a relicensing from GPLv2+ to LGPLv2+ per say.
> That said, 
> wanting to have KioFuse in kdelibs looks clearly misguided from a
> technical 
> perspective... It's definitely not a library, and it really has
> nothing to do 
> in kdelibs (apps don't have to use KioFuse, and shouldn't use it).
> 
> In short, I'm wondering what you're trying to achieve here.

You're right. The current design of KioFuse is that of a standalone
app that simply uses the KIO system. If KioFuse were to remain like
this, it is probably better off in kdebase/runtime or kdebase/apps. I
take back my request to re-license.

However, I want to modify the KIO system itself so that it is aware of
KioFuse mounts. Libfusi
(http://www.scheinwelt.at/~norbertf/devel/fusi/) will be used to keep
track of mounts. The glue between KIO and Libfusi will be brand new
code so no relicensing is needed.

The technical reason for doing this is to prevent KDE apps from
incurring a performance penalty when accessing remote locations. When
a KDE app wants to open a file in a KioFuse mount, KIO should
internally convert the local path to the remote path and bypass FUSE
altogether. Here is a scenario depicting this:

Assume ~/school/ is a local KioFuse mount pointing to
sftp://[email protected]/home/user/. When KWrite tries to open
~/school/essay.odt, the KIO subsystem should transparently convert
this URL to sftp://[email protected]/home/user/essay.odt and access the
latter directly.

Vlad


       
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