Re: Sweet Tooth : license of uploaded extensions for GNOME Shell ?



Hi,

Anything new on that topic ?

I still don't see any information regarding extensions license on https://extensions.gnome.org/

Thanks !


2012/1/3 Jasper St. Pierre <jstpierre mecheye net>
I'm working on such a feature.

On Sun, Jan 1, 2012 at 8:42 AM, thibaut bethune
<thibaut bethune gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm looking to https://extensions.gnome.org/upload/ but i still don't
> see any requirement to authors to agree to
> distribute their code under the GPL v2 or later when they upload an
> extension to extensions.gnome.org ?
>
> I guess that the sooner it will be done the easier it will be to solve
> the potential issue (before the site provide 100+ extensions !)
>
> Thanks
>
> Thibaut
>
> On Thu, 15 Sep 2011 13:19:00 -0400 Owen Taylor wrote:
>
> "On Thu, 2011-09-15 at 14:47 +0200, Maciej Marcin Piechotka wrote:
>> On Thu, 2011-09-15 at 10:33 +0200, thibaut bethune wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > I've just learned about that project and i find it great.
>> >
>> > I haven't tried it yet but i saw that video
>> > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luZuhn5_b_8
>> >
>> > I just wanted to be sure that the interface will precise the extension license.
>> >
>> > Ideally it should maybe require the uploaded extension to have the
>> > same license that GNOME itself ?
>> >
>> > Thanks
>> >
>> > Thibaut
>> > France
>>
>> I may be wrong but as gnome-shell is on GPL isn't only GPL legal (but
>> IANAL)?
>
> It's a somewhat complicated question:
>
> If the extension isn't a derived work of the GNOME Shell code, then it's
> fine to distribute the extension code under whatever license you want -
> BSD, proprietary, whatever. Because it's not a derived work of GNOME
> Shell, the license of GNOME Shell can't matter.
>
> Now, the combination of GNOME Shell and the extension wouldn't be
> distributable. So as a _policy_ thing (not a legal thing), we we
> probably in any case want to require all extensions on
> extensions.gnome.org to be at least GPL compatible - to be under GPL,
> LGPL, BSD, MIT, etc.
>
> But are extensions derived works of the GNOME Shell code? If you copy
> code from GNOME Shell, obviously that makes your code a derived work.
> If you don't copy any code - if all the code is written from scratch,
> then there is still an argument that since you  had to look at the GNOME
> Shell code to write your extension, you had to test your code with the
> shell, etc, it might still be a derived work. (This is something that
> has been discussed at great length with respect to the kernel modules;
> I don't think there's a definitive answer.)
>
> To me, the simplest thing is that we require authors to agree to
> distribute their code under the GPL v2 or later when they upload an
> extension to extensions.gnome.org, and that's the license we use
> when distributing extensions.
>
> If an extension author wants declare in a README file or code comments
> that their extension code is also available under more permissive terms,
> that's their call, and it's not up to us to check that assertion or
> prevent them from making it.
>
> - Owen"
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--
  Jasper




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