Showing posts with label gpl. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gpl. Show all posts

Monday, September 01, 2008

Looking for people

Dear Lazyweb,
At the poppler project we are trying to relicense all our patches as GPLv2 or later so that in case that xpdf is ever relicensed to something newer than gpl2 only we are not stuck because of patches.
The problem is that we have problems getting answers from everyone, so i'm posting this so that in case you know some of the missing people in person or have IM adreses of them, you can bug them for me.
And now onto the names:
- Marco Pesenti Gritti
- Kjartan Maaras
- Timothy Lee
- Carl Worth
- Ed Catmur - specially problematic has his mail server bounces mails

Friday, June 13, 2008

KDE, plugins, GPL and closed source applications

Here i was today, thinking about this stuff (yeah you can say i'm weird).

In KDE all of our core libs are LGPL so if someone owns a Qt commercial license he can write closed source applications using kdelibs.

In KDE we also have this nice technology called KParts that let's you load plugins for lots of things on runtime. One of the KParts possibilities is to load a KPart for a specific mimetype.

Let's say the above closed source application uses KParts to preview things, and the user of that closed source application decides to preview a PDF.

In that moment, the KPart system will lookup and load the OkularPart that is able of viewing PDFs.

And there is where my mind broke, OkularPart is GPL and is being used by a closed source application.

"NO! VIOLATION!" Does my mind shout, but how can the closed source developer prevent it? All he did is use a LGPL library, so, maybe this is not a violation? And if it is, what are we doing in the KDE project to help the closed source developer be a good citizen? Maybe we should tell the kpart system what kind of Parts are acceptable?

Can someone highlight me?