GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 681834
License issue (GPL-2.0 vs GPL-2.0+)
Last modified: 2012-11-12 16:00:39 UTC
originally downstream reported: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=775842 Summary: GPL-2.0 (only) files found in GPL-2.0+ licensed gnome-control-center 3.4.2 gnome-control-center-3.4.2/panels/background/cc-background-xml.c gnome-control-center-3.4.2/panels/background/cc-background-xml.h /* * Authors: Rodney Dawes * Bastien Nocera * * Copyright 2003-2006 Novell, Inc. (www.novell.com) * Copyright 2011 Red Hat Inc. * * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify * it under the terms of version 2 of the GNU General Public License * as published by the Free Software Foundation * * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the * GNU General Public License for more details. * * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License * along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software * Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Street #330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA. * */ If these files are compiled with the rest of the package (predominantly GPL-2.0+) the license of the resulting binary will be GPL-2.0, not GPL-2.0+ (at least according to the FSF guidelines). Would it be feasible to have those files relicensed to either GPL-2.0+ to match the license of the rest of the package, or to some other GPL-2.0+ compatible license? Upstream for the files (not sure who this is on Red Hat's side) should comment.
dobey, hadess: Are you fine with relicensing your two files to GPL-2.0+?
My understanding is you'll need to ask Novell's and Red Hat's legal departments for permission to relicense, as those are whom the copyrights are assigned to.
Unless I'm mistaken, the only portions of code left from Rodney would be the cc_background_xml_load_xml_internal() function. The rest of the code comes from Thomas Wood and myself (and 2 trivial one-liners from AlexL and Cosimo). Michael, can you check on this re-licensing question? It's all fine from our (RH and gnome-c-c maintainers) side.
Thanks so much Bastien - Ciaran provided approval for this too; so I assume that we're good to go with a GPLv2+ in this instance, nice to have it consistent. I pushed the change to master. Thanks !