GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 665347
Should care about copyright/license
Last modified: 2012-01-26 10:45:12 UTC
Hi, Currently, the extensions website does mention at all extension copyright holders & their licenses. The problem is twofold: extensions are uploaded without an explicit copyright & license (hence "all rights reserved" applies by my interpretation of the law and GNOME may violate copyrights by redistributing them — but IANAL); the other side of the coin is that users do not get to see the license under which the extensions that they are receiving are, and hence are unaware of the rights that they may or may not have. In an extension I uploaded, I put a GPLv2+ COPYING and an explicit copyleft header, however that is not the case with most extensions. I believe this should be fixed and explicit copyright and license should be mentioned on the metadata and on the extensions website. Additionally, I'd very much like for GNOME to encourage users to share and receive extensions that are free software, rather than proprietary-licensed. Thanks,
All extensions are derivatives of the GNOME Shell codebase, which is GPLv2. All extensions therefore have to be licensed under the GPLv2.
For more information, see Owen's mail that he wrote to gnome-shell-list: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-September/msg00091.html
Owen's mail is not saying exactly what you said. In any case, shouldn't all these be mentioned in the extensions website, both when viewing and when uploading a new extension? And, besides that, you need to also list copyright *holders* per extension (which is not the same as original-authors).
I would agree that we need to have more
Sorry, truncated comment. I would agree that we need to have more attention to copyright and license in the design of the site. * When uploading an extension, the author should have to click through a checkbox confirming that the extension can be distributed under GPLv2+ terms. (To do this retroactively, just extract the emails of all extension uploaders so far and send a "if you object, please reply" mail.) * We should put GPLv2+ terms somewhere at the bottom of each extension page - "This extension is made available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, _version 2_ or later" * Copyright/authorship should probably be an explicit separate piece of the extension metadata. Of course, it can be complicated - and extension can have many authors, can be derived from other extensions with many authors, but still, something like: By John Doe. Derived from Alternative Workspace List by James Smith and others even if it isn't 100% accurate is likely better than not giving any chance to display anything.
We now have a required checkbox to make sure that extension authors can distribute their extension under "GPLv2+", so I'm satisfied with closing this bug.