libface under GPLv3

[Marcel Wiesweg]

Hi,

reading through libface, I have seen that this library is licensed under
GPLv3-or-later.
Is there any strong reason not to license it under GPLv2+GPLv3-or-later?

The current state is in violation of the KDE licensing policy:
http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy
See also:
http://www.layt.net/john/blog/odysseus/a_reminder_on_gpl3_code_in_kde

libface is clearly not part of KDE proper, but code developed under the KDE
umbrella for GSoC, with the intention of writing a KDE wrapper and using it in
KDE code, should in my opinion comply with KDE's policy.

Marcel
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[Aditya Bhatt]

Hi Marcel,

Personally I don't really care much about what my code is licensed as, so I'm okay with any license. Is GPLv2 okay? I'm quite fine with BSD too.

What do you say, Alex? What license should we switch libface to?

On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 8:51 PM, Marcel Wiesweg <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi,

reading through libface, I have seen that this library is licensed under
GPLv3-or-later.
Is there any strong reason not to license it under GPLv2+GPLv3-or-later?

The current state is in violation of the KDE licensing policy:
http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy
See also:
http://www.layt.net/john/blog/odysseus/a_reminder_on_gpl3_code_in_kde

libface is clearly not part of KDE proper, but code developed under the KDE
umbrella for GSoC, with the intention of writing a KDE wrapper and using it in
KDE code, should in my opinion comply with KDE's policy.

Marcel

--
Aditya Bhatt
Blog : http://adityabhatt.wordpress.com
Bitbucket: http://bitbucket.org/aditya_bhatt
Face Recognition Library : http://libface.sourceforge.net

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[Marcel Wiesweg]

> Hi Marcel,
>
> Personally I don't really care much about what my code is licensed as, so
> I'm okay with any license. Is GPLv2 okay? I'm quite fine with BSD too.
>
> What do you say, Alex? What license should we switch libface to?

It's only a detail but it can be important: You currently license under "GPLv3
or any later version". For KDE, the proposed solution is "GPL version 2 or
version 3 or later versions approved by the membership of KDE e.V."
Of course,  "GPL version 2 or version 3 or any later version" would be all
right as well.
It's just accepting GPLv2 as an alternative.

Why all this? Digikam is "GPLv2 or later". As soon as we link a GPLv3-only
library, to do this legally the whole product must implicitly be licensed as
GPLv3. That is OK because of the "or later" clause. But, as soon as there is
any library anywhere in the stack licensed as "GPLv2 only", this doesn't work,
and we can use only the GPLv3-only library, or only the GPLv2-only library.

Marcel
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