Relicense: we need your help!
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.
i think it is a way to ‘force’ the ‘or later’ relicense. I don’t like it very much. It could result in a deadlock.
GPL3 and friends you probably mean.
Good point, i will have a look at that.
Don’t dual-license. Just don (L)GPLv2 or later.
If you dual-liense to GPLv2 and GPLv3 only you’ll have to do it all again for GPLv4.
Would it be possible to also add koffice to your checks?
We have no option than allow it. Some people don’t agree to the ‘2 or later’ license as you basically agree to something you have not yet read.
Yes, that’s possible. The website now operates on a list of problematic folders which I received from Dirk. If you poke him for such a list for koffice or make a list your self, I can add it to the scripts.
Good luck with the relicensing efforts! I think it is very important and hope that many developers allow KDE e.V. to decide on future license changes (which is the most flexible solution in the long run).
By the way: does voting yes, yes, no, no make sense? (
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDE_Relicensing) e.g. Marc Mutz
You should also explain *why* it is “very, very important”.
Because the GPLv3 doesn’t allow you to link GPLv3 code with a program under the GPLv2 only.
The Samba project for example has choosen to move to the GPLv3 only so KDE with GPLv2 only can’t link againts newer libsmbclient.
Should the GPL and friends be added to KAboutData?