26th September 2003 by Derek Kite

This Week...

Quanta visual editor makes progress. Khtml gets text selection optimizations and immediate repaint from Safari. Kontact, KMail, KAddressbook get work on settings, time cards, drag and drop, plus many bug fixes.
Mark Kretschmann announced version 0.6.0 of the amaroK media player, which is in kdenonbeta. Here are the details:
We are proud to release version 0.6.0 of the amaroK media player.

This major update comes with many new features, as well as bugfixes and usability enhancements.

Changes:
  • complete network transparency. browse remote directories (e.g. ftp) and play tracks just like they were local
  • amaroK now has a new look. all the graphics were done by two professional graphic artists
  • command line interface. making it possible to start amaroK by clicking on a track in konqueror
  • enhanced drag and drop. you can now also drop URLs from other applications
  • enhanced support for streaming audio and the .pls playlist format
  • enhanced user interface. playlist filtering is now integrated in the playlist window
  • configurable keyboard shortcuts
  • timedisplay can now also show the remaining time
  • unique support for configurable aRts plugins
Homepage: amarok.sf.net
Jaroslaw Staniek updated the status of Kexi, the database application:
Currently, the main change in Kexi project is a migration to renewed db api (including db abstraction), kexidb module @ koffice/kexi/kexidb/, that can be hopfully considered as superset of QSql. Until other Kexi parts that depend on old kexiDB could be ported, Kexi sources can be broken. We have created old_db_api branch for accessible with:

cvs co -r old_db_api

for these, who are interested in building last working Kexi application version. old_db_api is considered as obsolete, so no special patches will be applied to this branch.

Above changes are strictly related to (default) embedded database engine addition to Kexi (SQLite).
Contrary to popular opinion, free software developers are very conscientious about licenses and who owns the code. There were two discussion this week on the subject. The first was about a file that is part of KMail. A license was added to the file, since there was none. Marc Mutz stated clearly:
If you want to change the license of a file, you need to obtain the permission from _every_ copyright holder (= author of code in that file). If _any_ copyright holder does not agree to the change, you have to replace her code with something you wrote, so she doesn't hold any copyrights anymore on that file. Sorry, as much as I like the change, there is no such shortcut as you tried!
The license addition was reverted, but Zack Rusin asked the question:
This of course leaves that file without a license, sure it's a violation of KDE policies but because radej and dijkema who are listed in the files annotate are no longer with us, there's no way to consult license of that file with them. Now here's a question:
  • does the fact that KMail is GPL mean that this file is GPL or does the fact the this file doesn't have a license mean that KMail doesn't have one?
Ingo Klocker responded by saying:
AFAIK KMail was started as GPL (which version?) application. And since the license was never changed all files which belong to KMail are of course GPL licensed. A missing license header doesn't change this. The Qt exception is more problematic. Since the license of the original KMail didn't include this exception it's more or less impossible to add it now (unless all authors agree).

Having said this adding a GPL header without Qt exception should be completely valid because this would just be stating the obvious (resp. the silent agreement of all people who contributed to this GPL application).
Marc Mutz responded:
"Of course"? I don't think so. Just to be sure that I'm not completely paranoid, I asked Bernhard Reiter about this and he basically said that this is a very weak (legal) argument that is very hard to prove and it would be better to obtain permission first...

To second-guess the intentions of the (all) copyright holders of the code is skating on very thin ice.

> A missing license header doesn't change
> this.

Of course it does. Legally, a missing license means that you can't use the code _at all_. Given that the code was voluntarily donated to KMail, you could at least make a point that the code was meant to be used in KMail. Extracting parts of the code to another library or even another program is again skating on thin ice.
Further comments were made that "this is madness". Unfortunately a reality we must face. A second license discussion ensued regarding the star catalogue that KStars uses. There is a catalogue available that is in the public domain, but it is somewhat incomplete. Jason Harris made arrangements to use another catalogue that is licensed for non-commercial use. This limitation goes against the debian licensing rules, and the KDE licensing policy found at http://developer.kde.org/policies/licensepolicy.html. The default catalog is now the free one, but the preferred one will be available at the kstars website.

Statistics

Commits 1814 by 205 developers, 300041 lines modified, 674 new files
Open Bugs 4702
Open Wishes 4508
Bugs Opened 319 in the last 7 days
Bugs Closed 453 in the last 7 days

Commit Summary

Module Commits
kde-i18n
415
 
kdebase
130
 
kdepim
125
 
kdelibs
124
 
kdenonbeta
107
 
kdenetwork
96
 
www
86
 
kdevelop
80
 
kdesdk
70
 
kdegraphics
69
 
Lines Developer Commits
1269
 
Daniele Medri
97
 
3543
 
Stephan Binner
81
 
1020
 
Stephan Kulow
58
 
875
 
Dirk Mueller
52
 
603
 
George Staikos
51
 
1270
 
Matthias Kretz
42
 
2945
 
Anne-Marie Mahfouf
42
 
827
 
Nicolas Goutte
34
 
38324
 
Pedro Morais
30
 
273
 
Laurent Montel
29
 

Internationalization (i18n) Status

Language Percentage Complete
Danish (da)
99.63%
 
Swedish (sv)
98.93%
 
Hungarian (hu)
97.27%
 
Brazilian Portuguese (pt_BR)
95.4%
 
Spanish (es)
92.95%
 
French (fr)
84.73%
 
Catalan (ca)
84.65%
 
Portuguese (pt)
83.07%
 
Estonian (et)
81.4%
 
Italian (it)
78.55%
 

Bug Killers

No commits found