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Subject: RFC: Rockbox Utility relicensing to GPLv3+

RFC: Rockbox Utility relicensing to GPLv3+

From: Solomon Peachy via rockbox <rockbox_at_lists.haxx.se>
Date: Thu, 15 May 2025 21:32:10 -0400

The Rockbox Utility is currently distributed under the GPLv2+ (ie "v2 or
any later version"). There's a feature I'd like to integrate [1] but it
relies on a library that is GPLv3+.

Consequently, integrating this would mean that our RButil binaries
would effectively be promoted from GPLv2+ to GPLv3+.

As we don't play the sorts of "free-for-me-but-not-for-thee" games with
DRM or patents that caused the tech industry as a whole to avoid GPLv3,
I don't personally see any downsides to this change. Similarly, it is
my understanding that this would not affect our ability to produce
signed packages for proprietary OSes (ie Windows or MacOS).

That said, I don't feel comfortable unilaterally making this decision.

I've asked about this on IRC a couple of times but the reach and
feedback has been pretty limited. Hopefully more folks will chime in
here. (I'm not asking on the forum because this is largely irrelevant
from an end-user perspective)

So, thoughts? (And some meaningful patch review would be nice too, I'm
not well-versed in C++ in general)

[1] https://gerrit.rockbox.org/r/c/rockbox/+/6515

    In short, it adds support for 7z-compressed archives via use of
    libq7zip. Using 7z vs zip produces files about 40% smaller, saving
    us considerable server resources.

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachy			      pizza at shaftnet dot org (email&xmpp)
                                      _at_pizza:shaftnet dot org   (matrix)
Dowling Park, FL                      speachy (libera.chat)



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Received on 2025-05-15

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