Make kde ports distributable

Nicolas Pavillon nicos at macports.org
Sat Dec 15 21:33:22 PST 2012


Hello, 

I ask again about license issues, but since it is a pretty borderline case, I prefer having other opinions. I have been looking at how to make kde ports distributable, as for now all are blocked due to a conflict between GPL and openssl license, even though packages are commonly distributed on other systems. 

The trick is that while kdelibs is a mix of GPL, LGPL and BSD, only two binaries link to openssl: kcm_crypto (not built anymore in present versions anyway), and libkio.dylib. Then, libkio.dylib is pure LGPL code, and links with libssl only at runtime if necessary. With this trick, it is considered that kdelibs binaries can be distributed. 

Then, if this is admitted, this means to my understanding that all the following ports depending on kdelibs4 could be made distributable:
- non-GPL ones even though they depend on kdelibs4 since the conflict is solved. 
- GPL ones which do not link with libkio.dylib
- GPL ones which link with libkio.dylib, but do not require runtime linking with openssl

With this, I however still don't understand how packages such as kdepimlibs can be distributed, as there is clearly GPL code which links with openssl through the libkio library. 

The question is then if Macports should also enforce this in order to make several ports distributable, and if yes, how ? Would the license_noconflict keyword be acceptable ?

Cheers, 

Nicolas


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