Grumble Grumble

By Andrew Smith

I got an email from someone who appears to be helping KDE out with switching their licences. I guess at some point the guys decided that nothing in KDE shall be licenced GPLv2 only, and that’s the request I got – change the licence to “GPL2 or 3″ or “GPL2 or later”.

Here are a couple of links describing the process:

http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDE_Relicensing

I’m not surprised to see only people names listed on the second page, no project names. I wonder how much software KDE plans to scrap just because of some overly idealistic dudes with big beards decided the new GPL is much better and must be incompatible with the old GPL.

My piece of code in there is bkisofs – a library for reading and writing ISO files which is being used by Ark (the KDE archive manager). The integration was not my doing, I only helped – but the library itself is mine. KDE won’t explode the funcionality is removed from Ark.

I haven’t replied to the request yet. On the one hand I don’t care if it’s licenced GPL2 or 3, the changes I recall don’t affect this particular software. On the other hand – I am opposed to the GPL3 as a matter of principle, and I don’t like bending over or getting strong-armed into doing things with my volunteer time.

And if I allow this, that will count as a contribution to GPL3 zealotry.

I’ll go review the GPL3 some time in the next few days. If anyone still reads my blog and has ideas one way or the other – please share.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 23:22 and is filed under Open Source, Safe For Seneca. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.