On Sun, 2006-07-09 at 20:27 -0700, Alex Lancaster wrote: > >>>>> "JL" == James \"Doc\" Livingston writes: > JL> Things have since changed, and I've been informed that Redhat is > JL> (pending final confirmation of legal advice) planning to drop > JL> Rhythmbox from Fedora Core[1] and RHEL unless it is re-licenced > JL> under something that allows linking to arbitrary GStreamer > JL> plugins. > > Do you have a reference for this? I couldn't find any posts on any of > the fedora-* mailing lists. I would be very surprised if Red Hat was > planning to ship the Fluendo mp3 plugin with Fedora Core, since it > would be specifically against their policy of a 100% open-source, > patent-free software distribution:
I don't have any public references. I was contacted by one of RH's "Fedora Desktop" guys (Jonathan Blandford), who said he was giving me a heads-up on what their legal guys were doing. It does sound odd if nothing had been mention of any the fedora development lists yet. The plugin is open-source (the source is MIT licenced), it's just that the binary version's licence isn't compatible with the GPL (but is with LGPL, MIT etc). > This is because it effectively makes an upstream package have to > choose between a license that makes it compatible with derivative > distributions (i.e. RHEL being derivative of Fedora Core) that may > wish to include proprietary plugins, or face being dropped from the > Core distribution One thing I haven't figured out is how anyone planning to ship such a plugin could also ship any Qt-based GStreamer-using applications. Because Qt is triple-licenced GPL, QPL (which AIUI is incompatible in the same way as the GPL) and commercial-licence. Not that they would use the MP3 plugin normally, but things like Sound-Juicer and the gstreamer-properties program from gnome-media are currently GPL'd. They would however use them if it was in one of the user-defined pipelines they used, or link to the plugin if it got loaded to do a registry update. Of course RedHat has a legal team for a reason, and I'm sure they'll be thinking about those things - which doesn't really affect Rhythmbox. > (and/or being "relegated" to Extras, which does have > the perception of being in different status, regardless of how "equal" > Core and Extras are supposed to be). I'm not up on the latest Fedora stuff, but my understanding was that Core was officially supported (and a large part of it was shipped on the official ISOs) and Extras was the stuff you could download later. But I'm quite possibly wrong. > JL> To re-licence we need the agreement of all copyright holders; if > JL> someone refuses to give permission, or we can't get hold of > JL> them[2], then we either rip out what they contributed or don't go > JL> ahead with it. > > Could be tricky but not impossible. After all totem did it. How many > contributors were involved in that relicensing? I'm not exactly sure where the line is drawn on this kind of thing, but combining the AUTHORS file and the copyright statements at the top of all the source files that are GPL'd (some are copied from other projects and are LGPL) gives 46 people. There may be people missing from that list (you're not listed), and there may be people on it who have contributed a trivial amount of code, but it's a reasonable approximation. > How would it apply to plugins? Would all distributed plugins also have > to be under the same exception? What about 3rd party plugins that > somebody might write and make available on their website for including > in ~/.gnome/rhythmbox/plugins. IANAL, but my understanding is: Any plugin that does anything interesting will need to make calls back into Rhythmbox and use it's code; linking to Rhythmbox and forming a derivative work. As such they must obey the terms of the GPL. Cheers, James "Doc" Livingston -- I am Dyslexia of Borg. Your ass will be laminated. _______________________________________________ rhythmbox-devel mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/rhythmbox-devel
