john.layt.net

[Edit: revised version hiding my blushes by giving the right reason for the policy, it's nothing to do with Qt anymore, D'oh! :-)]

Licensing and license compatability is hard, and I'm no expert (that would be Ade...), but I do know that krazy is telling me there is an increasing amount of code turning up in KDE that is licensed only under GPL3 which is a no-no according to the KDE Licensing Policy.  The policy is in place because we need to keep our code base consistent and internally compatible while still allowing us to link to GPL2 only libraries if needed.

I'll be nudging people to get fixes made, but please remember that any new app code needs to be (GPL2+ || (GPL2+ && GPL3+)).  Any new library code (kdelibs, kdepimlibs, kdebase-runtime) needs to be (LGPL2.1+ || (LGPL2.1+ && LGPL3+) || BSD || MIT || X11) where appropriate.  This is just a high-level summary, read the Licensing Policy for the exact details, start the New Year with a refresher course :-).  Contact the licensing mailing list if you need expert advice.

Don't forget you must also include a copyright statement in the form "Copyright <year> <name of author> <e-mail>".  Although not explained in the policy, there's a few important criteria this needs to meet to carry maximum legal weight (at least according to discussions on the licensing list):

• You must write the word Copyright, writing (c) has no legal standing, and the symbol © only has standing in some jurisdictions.
• The <year> is the year you wote or changed the code, not the year you committed or released it.
• Write out every year you modify the code, don't use a range like 2008-2010 as this apparently carries less weight legally.
• The author must be a person or a legal entity such as a company or non-profit.  You cannot just say "The KFoo Team" as this has no legal weight, you have to name each author individually and the years that they modified the code.

So an ideal notice would look like "Copyright 2003, 2004, 2005, 2009 Joe Bloggs joe.bloggs@kde.org". 

I see a few people trying to beat the email harvesters by writing "joe.bloggs kde org", I guess that's still acceptable if a little futile? Please try make the email an address that will last a while: University, work, and even ISP addresses have natural life-spans far shorter than your code and someone may need to reach you 5-10 years later.  The kdemail forwarder is a good option if you are not an ev member with a kde.org address (hmm, about time I joined!).

Krazy is your friend for checking stuff like this, remember to look a couple of days after any commit to see if you've missed something :-)  I wonder if we could have an svn hook that runs krazy and apidox over only the files changed by a commit and e-mails the result to the committer? Or if all the checks would be too inefficient, at least an important subset?  All I know is most people forget to check krazy and apidox, so any automation would be good.

Happy New Year y'all!