amarok licensing

[Jeff Mitchell]

Dirk Mueller wrote:
> 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). 
>   
I wonder if there's a way to future-proof this.  By which I mean, I 
wonder if, when we get in touch with all the non-trivial contributors 
past and present, we can have everyone agree (in writing/some other 
legally acceptable way) that future license exceptions/changes for the 
Amarok project can be instituted without contacting all non-trivial past 
contributors if (unanimous, 90%, 80%) of current active contributors 
vote for the change, or some such scheme.

--Jeff