Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Rhythmbox licencing

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Thu, 2006-07-27 at 23:06 +1000, James "Doc" Livingston wrote:
> 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.

As it's just the one plugin, I agree that it should be easier to rewrite
it than try to relicense it if the original author isn't interested.

> * 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.

Most of those people are core GNOME contributors, and I don't see them
having any problems with the relicensing.

> 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.

Hopefully, we'd be able to get most of the answers quickly, and if some
people just plain refuse, then we can look at their contributions, and
ways of working around the code we can't relicense.

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

Let me know if you need any help. I'm pretty sure Christian would like
to help as well on this one.

You can already count my (little) contributions as GPL + exception :)

-- 
Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net> 
I didn't want somebody looking up my arsehole or something.
                                                   -- Donald Sutherland