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.