Re: Relicensing Nautilus to GPLv3+

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Wed, 2017-05-17 at 17:01 +0300, Ernestas Kulik wrote:
> (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.

If nautilus is GPLv3+, that means we can't link it against GPLv2-only
or LGPLv2-only libraries in the extensions. I'm also not opening the
can of worms that is non-GPL-compatible dependencies of extensions
(such as proprietary, or patent-encumbered GStreamer plugins), because
that's an existing problem.

What's the end goal for relicensing? What problems do the current
license cause that require a relicense?

Cheers