Dear kommunity, I am on the reviewing process of a paper submission about open source licensing, and one of the reviewers has one concern that I would like to discuss it a bit further with you. The paper is not directly related to KDE, but I am writing to this mailing list to get some opinions from my KDE friends, in particular, due to your experience with open source licensing.
The reviewer proposes an approach for software licensing. In summary, s/he believes that if the project is using exclusively permissive or weak copyleft licenses, there is no need to put a license for the entire project. On his/her words: "You don't need to specify a package-level license. What you can do is put a "default" license to your package which would mean that in the absence of a license in a file, that file would be under this license. This allows not having to specify the license in all files (although that is the recommended way of doing things). Note that this default license should be permissive or weak copyleft." I understand that his/her suggestions make sense (this would allow novel tools to improve license visualization, like that color bar that GitHub uses for programming languages could be used), but I also wonder whether this would make sense in practice (this would require that all source code files are properly licensed). I have my own opinions, but I would like to hear the kommunity about your feelings on that proposal and possible advantages/disadvantages. All the best, -- Filipe Saraiva http://filipesaraiva.info/
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