Re: Relicensing Nautilus to GPLv3+

[Carlos Soriano <csoriano protonmail com>]

Hello,

After asking some authors of the current code that we have as GPL3+ inside nautilus, and pondering for a while, I realized the practicity of moving away from that code or convince those authors to relicense as GPL2+ is more a burden than the real benefit.

The only problem that arises if Nautilus becomes GPL3+ as per yesteday discussion in IRC at #gnome-hackers is that extensions that are GPL2-only cannot be used anymore.

Keep in mind GPL2+ are fine.

Said this, I took a look at extensions which are not retired from distros and that have seen a release in at least the last 3 years. So far they are:

nautilus-dropbox - GPL3+

nautilus-image-converter - GPL2+

nautilus-pastebin - GPL2+

nautilus-python - GPL2+

nautilus-search-tool - GPL2+

nautilus-sendto - GPL2+

nautilus-terminal - GPL2+

Which is completely fine.

Now, there is an issue with Totem plugin for Nautilus which adds a custom page to the properties page, since Totem is GPL2+ with a special clause for propietary gstreamer plugins.

However, that was already an unnoticed issue.

I don't want to get much deeper into all of this, given that being unnoticed for so long time probably means in practicity it doesn't matter much.

We will work on a workaround for this though, making this feature available through DBUS where this doesn't apply.

Given this, we will continue to our plan to relicense Nautilus project to GPL3+ next week if nothing serious gets noticed.

Best regards,

Carlos Soriano

-------- Original Message --------

Subject: Re: Relicensing Nautilus to GPLv3+

Local Time: May 17, 2017 6:49 PM

UTC Time: May 17, 2017 4:49 PM

From: nicolas ndufresne ca

To: Frederic Crozat <fred crozat net>, nautilus-list gnome org

release-team gnome org, desktop-devel-list gnome org

Le mercredi 17 mai 2017 à 14:55 +0000, Frederic Crozat a écrit :

> Le mer. 17 mai 2017 à 16:02, Ernestas Kulik <ernestask gnome org> a

> écrit :

> > (Attempt no. 2, since Geary hates me)

> >

> > Hi,

> >

> > As the current licensing situation in Nautilus is quite

> > complicated, I

> > and Carlos are planning a move to relicense the entire codebase to

> > GPLv3+.

> >

> > The codebase has files under several licenses: LGPLv2+, GPLv2+ and

> > GPLv3+, the latter implicitly making the project be licensed under

> > its

> > terms, so our options are quite limited here.

> >

> > The situation wrt extensions is also not entirely clear, as the

> > extension library is LGPLv2+ with Nautilus being GPLv2+, which in

> > turn

> > disallows loading non-free extensions. Given the fact that it is

> > not

> > meant to be a generic mechanism for loading extensions, I feel like

> > relicensing it without much consideration is reasonable.

>

> I know at least one proprietary extension  for Nautilus (integration

> with Synology NAS product) and I'm not sure we should prevent

> proprietary extensions to be used for Nautilus.

You can just mimic Totem exception clause. This is used to allow

proprietary GStreamer plugins.

https://git.gnome.org/browse/totem/tree/COPYING#n345

regards,

Nicolas_______________________________________________

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