[Kde-pim] KMail License issues.

[Adriaan de Groot]

On Tuesday 16 September 2008 18:52:45 David Jarvie wrote:
> On Tuesday 16 September 2008 15:43, Bertjan Broeksema wrote:
> > On Wednesday 17 September 2008 15:16:51 Thomas McGuire wrote:
> >> Well, the only way to do that is to ask _all_ contributers to those
> >> files
> >> to relicense the code to something GPL3-compatible.
> >
> > By this you mean everybody who has made a commit once to that file? Or
> > everybody who added a copyright statement (or some sort of) to the
> > specific
> > file?

Somewhere in between. As David says, not every change is a copyrightable 
contribution. And there are a lot of people who should be in the copyright 
headers, but are not.

> is obvious. So you only need to contact those who have contributed in a
> meaningful way - although quite where the boundary lies is no doubt an
> issue for lawyers :(

[ade] : "I talk to lawyers so you don't have to."

It's most effective to do an SVN log;

for i in $FILES ; do
	svn log --xml svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdepim/$i | \
	grep '^<author>' | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
done

something like that will tell you authors and counts of contributions, so you 
know who to track down first. In general:

1) For files with no license header, ask the first contributor (svn log | grep 
author | tail -1) what the license would have been, something like:

	"Because the file <foo> has no license we cannot -- in the strictest sense of 
copyright law -- continue to distribute it, so I'm contacting all of the 
contributors to determine what the license should have been. Implicitly your 
file <foo> would have been following the license of other files in the 
directory, which is <GPLv2 or LGPLv2>, but we need to make that explicit. 
Please answer these two questions:

- which license would you have originally used <GPLv2, GPLv2 or later, LGPLv2, 
LGPLv2 or later> for the file <foo>?

- do you agree to re-license the file now to the current KDE PIM license which 
ought to apply to <foo>, which is <GPLv3 or later, LGPLv3 or later>?

I will need your answers -- as original author of the file -- to carry the 
question to other contributors in the file, so that we can do a licensing and 
re-licensing properly and continue to distribute the work under strict 
copyright interpretations. Of course you want the software to be Free 
Software, but that means doing some of the "paperwork" too, that's why I'm 
asking this question now."

2) Go to all contributors with a similar question.

3) Add relevant header.

4) Commit &| profit!

[ade]
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