Relicensing update
The last weeks I’ve mainly spend my time on the relicensing efford. Basically what it means is that we are trying to relicense all GPL2 files to a dual license GPL2&GPL3 or to ‘GPL2 or later’. It’s a task which on one hand is not very exciting (ok, boring is a better word), on the other hand it is interesting.
Interesting because you are talking to all kinds of people of the past. Delving in the history of the KDE contributors. We have some interesting tools like the website, and I’m learning GIT, which we use to store the mails people send us with approvals. Just for reference.
We see that the current set of contributors is easy reachable and motivated to relicense. Now that those contributors are almost all approached, we are now approaching the contributors who only contributed a few lines (but not ignorable) and contributors which haven’t contributed in years. These people are a lot harder to reach and less responsive, probably not reading there email every hour anymore.
Anyway, the work is progressing nicely, we are down to 850 files left todo, we started at 1100. Some modules like kdeedu, kdegames, kdesdk, kdegraphics are done, some are a lot more problematic like kdepim and kdelibs and base.
If you have not yet approved to the relicensing, please go to the techbase-project page. If you have any questions, find me on IRC or mail me (tomalbers@kde.nl).
What are the consequenses if we don’t relicence properly in time? Is it possible that some gpl3 based distros will not legally be able to distribute kde 4, or at least large parts of it? Should we be worried?
Well, that isn’t the way that I thought that dual licensing worked. More of it is one license or the other at one time. But hey, if we can have our cake and eat it too that’s great and I sincerely hope that I’m wrong about it.
Maybe this has been discussed before, but what would be the practical purpose of relicensing KDE to include GPLv3 (aside from being able to link with samba)? Additionally, since Qt is still released under GPLv2 wouldn’t that make KDE impossible to distribute if it were licensed with GPLv3?
I’m personally neutral towards this, but it seems like licensing KDE as anything other than GPLv2 would be very difficult in practice. Would there be a way to create wrappers to GPLv3 code so that it could potentially be linked to GPLv2 code?
But what do I know? IANAL :P.
Well, it’s difficult to guess what will happen. Some dependencies of KDE will switch to GPL3 – like samba – which will probably cause some distro’s to disable certain KDE features when the license does not allow using those dependencies.
In practise I’m not that worried for now, they can always use an older version of that dependency, but we should fix it as soon as we can.
>Additionally, since Qt is still released under GPLv2 wouldn’t that
>make KDE impossible to distribute if it were licensed with GPLv3?
No, we are dual licensing, so ‘GPL2 or GPL3′, so it will be ok to link to Qt (as we are GPL2 compatible) and to Samba (as we are GPL3 compatible). At least that is how i understand it. Anyhow, I think Trolltech will recognise GPL3 when they have finished studying it.
We really want to make an efford to relicense all the files, when we are stuck with that, we can always think about rewriting code, use wrappers (if possible) or other tricks.