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Subject: Licensing and Copyright Issues

Licensing and Copyright Issues

From: ʎɹq <godeater_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2007 09:22:39 +0100

Hi all,

Recently the IRC channel has been rather full of discussion around the
current licensing of Rockbox (GPLV2 is how most people interpret it,
but it *is* a little unclear), and whether or not we should move to
GPLV3 in order to include code from other such projects (espeak is the
primary example here).

This brings up further interesting questions, not least of which is:

If we want to move to GPLV3, we need the permission of all Copyright
holders to the Rockbox source code in order to do so.

So firstly, I'd like to ask all current (C) holders to make their
feelings on the subject known.

Secondly though, we have another problem. Many of you will be aware of
the sad loss of HCl (Michiel van der Kolk) last year, his contribution
to Rockbox is greatly missed. As a contributor, he of course had
copyrighted code in the Rockbox tree (Rockboy leaps out as an
example), but since he is no longer with us - he can't venture an
opinion on the license issue. Most of us believe that his copyrights
will have defaulted to a family member - but since his family has
other problems on their plate at the moment - we also feel it would be
tactless to approach them about it - at least for the near future. In
that vein, myself and Bagder were wondering about whether or not we
could assign our copyrights to an organisation, which would manage
them in the unfortunate cases of any more of us passing away
unexpectedly. This would both benefit Rockbox, since the copyright
would still be held by someone who cares about the project, and also
the families of those involved, since they wouldn't have to take care
of something which they likely think extremely trivial.

Bagder has already approach the SFLC (which BusyBox use), but they
haven't come back to him, and so we might be forced to consider
alternatives. Any suggestions would be most welcome.

Anyway - that's it in a nutshell. So. Discuss!

Bryan
Received on 2007-09-11

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