The past view days I’ve witnessed some blogs and remarks on IRC-channels which are talking about a failure of the release team. As planets in general are the source of using more and more firm language, let me join the club: I don’t like them. Especially not the one which suggested to replace the release-team with the one doing the koffice releases (refering to the fact that they are labeling their release as alfa-release). Even though it was probably meant to be funny or something. It was not.

Troy indicates that we would be better of with a single release dude. I’m sorry but that is plain silly. In the lines above his statement he is blaming Ruurd to not say ‘plasma sucks, give me the old panel back’ with some very convincing arguments. In that light it is amazing that he ends his blog with ‘release team sucks, give me the (old) release dude back’. I wonder why this should be any different? Tell me exactly what the release-team did wrong and what the better alternative is, but please don’t forget to mention how the process can be improved. To be clear: I do agree it could be improved, but I’m not sure how to do it. But going back to a single release dude is a simplistic solution. Aaron already touched the subject in a recent blog.

The only reason I see mentioned in Troys blog is ‘there was less hesitation during decision making processes’. Sure. If one guy gets to decide, it’s pretty easy. If a group has to decide something there needs to be a discussion. Don’t confuse that discussion with ‘hesitation’, it’s simply not the case. It also does not say anything about the quality of the decision. Would the single release dude make better decisions than a group? A group can discuss pros and cons of a decision seen through the eyes of different people, which should lead to a bigger list of pros and cons and should lead to a better informed outcome. Or is it that people simply like firm statements better: this is how we are going to do it, no discussion possible.

It is true that the process of naming the releases is a bit difficult. We are constantly giving weight to the current state of KDE4 and what we want to reach and how to motivate people to do their part of The Job. One year ago there was no planning at all for KDE4. Since that moment we have decided on a planning, got people out of the ‘waiting’/'tinkering’-mode and we are now relatively close to a release. I believe that without a release team that would not have happened. Would it have happened with a single release-dude? We don’t know.

The release-team has answered a lot of questions on IRC (which is very difficult for a single release dude, considering contributions are made 24/7), kept the wiki up-to-date so everyone knows what freeze is active, which modules are problematic and discussed the inclusion/exclusion of some applications, coordinated with the marketing & promo & tagging team/persons about the release announcements, and all in coordination with the people doing the actual work on KDE4. The release-team is not a clearly defined group of people. It’s a mailinglist with people who discuss things, sometime people join a particular discussion and sometimes not. In my huble opinion this is working beyond my expectations, also considering this it the first time we try this.

I think it’s really demotivating to read that troy wants to return to a single release dude. I see this ‘careless demotivation’ happen a lot. People making simple, cheap remarks, but in the meanwhile hurting and demotivating others. Ruurd made a blog about Plasma – not so nice to read if it’s your code and you read that as the first thing in the morning. Troy about the Release Team. And it also has happened with some webkit remarks. Think twice.

At this moment we have received around 80 contributors permission to relicense from GPL2 to GPL2+ or GPL2/3. But there are 1700 contributors with a subversion account.

So again, I want to ask you to add your name to the four lists we have. Either on the techbase-site (which also contains more info), or via svn:


svn co svn+ssh://$user@svn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdesdk/scripts
vi scripts/relicensecheck.pl & add your name to all the four lists (that is if you agree to all four options)
svn ci scripts -m "I agree to a relicense"


Really, it’s not more than a minute of work for you.

Currently we are making progress in relicensing some of the source code of KDE. But we need your help.

The idea is to change the license of all files which are now ‘GPL2 only’ to ‘GPL2 or later’ or to a dual license GPL2 & GPL3. It is very, very important we do this.

You might want to know if You should do anything. Well, there is an easy way to check! Go to this site, and enter your subversion account name in the box, hit submit and you can see the list of files which are GPL2 only. The on mouse over shows the remaining commits which block a relicense.

If you are listed and you want to help us, there is an easy way to give us permission to relicense the files you contributed to. Even when you are not listed, but want to make sure your code will be easy to relicense in the future, you can add your name to the lists.

We will do all the hard work, you just have to give us permission to do so.

To make it almost copy and paste, this is what you should do:

svn co svn+ssh://$user@svn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdesdk/scripts
vi scripts/relicensecheck.pl & add your name to all the four lists (that is if you agree to all four options)
svn ci scripts -m “I agree to a relicense”

If you never got the hang of svn, you can add your name to the techbase table, we will take care of the rest. That article also gives more info and nice graphics of the progress.

That’s all. The website will update after a few days and we can eventually relicense all files listed there. If you see a name of a person which does not read this blog but you know that person, please poke that person for us. It will make this project just a little bit nicer. You know, nobody likes these relicense projects, so we better finish it asap, so i can return hacking on something like Mailody again.