Re: KDE questions
Hi!
On Fri, Jun 09, 2000 at 04:19:36AM +0000, Jimmy O'Regan wrote:
> On Wed, 7 Jun 2000, Gregor Hoffleit wrote:
> ) On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 05:13:52PM +0200, Josip Rodin wrote:
> ) > On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 03:16:43PM +0200, Stefan Westerfeld wrote:
> ) > > What has been suggested by debian to relicense every line of KDE code to a
> ) > > special purpose GPL with an extra addition. Although this is advocated
> ) > > to be a solution of the problem, it is only theoretical: It is completely
> ) > > impossible to convince each and every author/contributor that once in his
> ) > > life wrote a line of KDE code to change his license. So in that respect, no.
> ) >
> ) > It's not completely impossible; usually copyright is retained (by the one
> ) > who sent the patch) on non-trivial, major changes. I doubt you have several
> ) > hundreds or thousands of those, per KDE program (i.e. per one program
> ) > author/maintainer who'd have do the boring work, requesting license changes
> ) > from those who wrote the patches).
> ) >
> ) > Another solution would be to rewrite those parts that contain other people's
> ) > code. I doubt anyone would volunteer normally; however seeing that $3K
> ) > offer, I wouldn't be surprised if someone does. :)
> )
> Wine did something similar recently - basically, if anyone has any
> problems with the change, say so, your code will be removed. Surely
> there's a full list of contributors in the ChangeLogs?
I didn't mean contributors only. There is also "relicense-resistant" code
which is written by developers who
- have no problem with their code being used in KDE because they have
written it only for KDE (and want it to be linked to Qt for this reason)
- do want their code be licensed under GPL
- will not accept a patched GPL with exception clause for their code
There are quite a few developers which want it that way, also under those
actively working on the KDE2.0 core. This is the reason an "official" license
change wasn't done.
Basically, the only way out for Debian & KDE I see is: package what you can,
and don't package what you can't, and try to improve the share you can package
by gradually convincing developers that if they change their license, you'll
be able to distribute their code. Maybe you could also discuss packaging code
which was only written for the sole purpose to be run with KDE.
Cu... Stefan
--
-* Stefan Westerfeld, stefan@space.twc.de (PGP!), Hamburg/Germany
KDE Developer, project infos at http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde *-
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