Re: FLA

On Thursday 06 February 2003 18:15, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
> On Thursday 06 February 2003 16:57, Waldo Bastian wrote:
<snip>
> > I think it leads to a very murky licensing situation when people
> > include GPL licensed code in code that is licensed
> > "GPL+Qt-exception". That either constitutes unlawfull relicensing
> > and/or the exception part is void from that point on. Given the
> > average (lack of) licensing-awareness of KDE contributors, I think
> > this is bound to create problems down the road because of the lack
> > of distinction between GPL and GPL+Qt-exception.

Well, the implications are clear: You may only execute the right that 
the Qt exception gives you if all of the GPL code that is linked into 
the given application contains the Qt exception. Otherwise, the 
resulting aggregate will be under the GPL and thus, the Qt exception 
cannot be executed by the user.

Depending on the application, this might work reasonably well 
(KOrganizer) or not at all (KMail, due to gpgme being linked in).

> The "GPL+Qt-Exception" licence works around the problem that Qt isn't
> considered a system library. That this makes it impossible to include
> GPL licenced code is a pity, but we have to live with that.

...until we have GPL'd Win/Mac ports of Qt.

> > Instead of GPL+Qt-exception it might be clearer to use QPL or BSD
> > instead.
>
> This wouldn't fit the intentions of all developers (at least it
> wouldn't fit mine). Both the QPL and the BSD licence have some
> siginificant disadvantages compared to the GPL.
>
> I think we should add a standard "GPL+Qt-exception" licence to the
> licences on developer.kde.org and use that were appropriate. If KDE
> developers licensing-awareness isn't sufficient to make correct usage
> of these licences we should work on improving the licencing-awareness
> instead of making compromises with the licencing itself.

I agree whole-heartedly with both paragraphs above.

Marc

-- 
If free-software authors lose the right to disclaim all warranties and
find themselves getting sued over the performance of the programs
they've written, they'll stop contributing free software to the world.
 -- Bruce Perens: Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution

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