Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Rhythmbox licencing

["James \"Doc\" Livingston" <doclivingston gmail com>]

On Sun, 2006-07-09 at 13:56 +1000, James "Doc" Livingston wrote:
> There was a short discussion on the list, but it petered out because it
> became apparent that no-one was actually planning to ship the plugin at
> that time.

The discussion seems to have finished again, so we should really do
something if we are going to relicence.


The general consensus appear to be in favour of re-licencing to GPL with
an exception for GStreamer plugins, and the only objection I think I've
heard being that it would mean we can't "borrow" code from other GPL'd
projects without getting permission to re-licence.


On the practical side, we are using code we've borrowed from other
places already, including:

* Part of the lyric-grabbing code is from Quod Libet, and although I
haven't asked the author, I heard it's unlikely he'd want to re-licence.
I've been thinking about re-writing the lyric core to be based on Ed
Catmur's code for album art (which would give us easily pluggable lookup
engines), at which point we could write some lookup engines ourselves
and drop the code from QL.

* The plugin system is heavily based on GEdit's, which is heavily based
on Epiphany's. I think there are about 5 or 6 people we'd need
permission from to relicence this.


Plus around thirty people listed in our AUTHORS file, in the copyright
headers of our files. It will be a reasonable amount of work to get
permission from everyone involved, but I think that it would be good in
the long run, as it means people can safely ship Rhythmbox together with
things like the Fluendo MP3 plugin without the legal headaches.

If no-one has any problems, I wouldn't mind getting the ball rolling on
this.


Cheers,

James "Doc" Livingston
-- 
I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.
    -- Plato