amarok licensing

Dirk Mueller mueller at kde.org
Thu Jul 26 18:52:35 CEST 2007


On Wednesday, 25. July 2007, Mark Kretschmann wrote:

> > Could you point us to the necessary changes we have to make?
> We were just wondering about this: Would we need to get permission
>from every single contributor?

The answer is two-fold: 

a) for changing the GPLv2 license into GPLv3: probably not, because the code 
nowhere said that amarok is going to be GPLv2 only, so one can assume 
implicit agreement for any later version to be fine as well. You have to be 
careful that you don't have any GPLv3-only code added to the tree. 

b) for the exception: yes, for any non-trivial contribution. (where trivial is 
nowhere clearly defined). I would try to contact all the major contributors 
and get their agreement, and if any smaller patches are unclear with no 
response (and no clear disagreement from the copyright holder), it should be 
okay (because this particular copyright holder would have to sue all other 
amarok developers, in which case you can still go and revert his patch given 
that it is not a significant contribution). 

Greetings,

Dirk





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