Re: Relicensing Nautilus to GPLv3+

Hello,

After asking some authors of the current code that we have as GPL3+ inside nautilus, and pondering for a while, I realized the practicity of moving away from that code or convince those authors to relicense as GPL2+ is more a burden than the real benefit.

The only problem that arises if Nautilus becomes GPL3+ as per yesteday discussion in IRC at #gnome-hackers is that extensions that are GPL2-only cannot be used anymore.
Keep in mind GPL2+ are fine.

Said this, I took a look at extensions which are not retired from distros and that have seen a release in at least the last 3 years. So far they are:
nautilus-dropbox - GPL3+
nautilus-image-converter - GPL2+
nautilus-pastebin - GPL2+
nautilus-python - GPL2+
nautilus-search-tool - GPL2+
nautilus-sendto - GPL2+
nautilus-terminal - GPL2+

Which is completely fine.

Now, there is an issue with Totem plugin for Nautilus which adds a custom page to the properties page, since Totem is GPL2+ with a special clause for propietary gstreamer plugins.
However, that was already an unnoticed issue.
I don't want to get much deeper into all of this, given that being unnoticed for so long time probably means in practicity it doesn't matter much.
We will work on a workaround for this though, making this feature available through DBUS where this doesn't apply.

Given this, we will continue to our plan to relicense Nautilus project to GPL3+ next week if nothing serious gets noticed.

Best regards,
Carlos Soriano

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Relicensing Nautilus to GPLv3+
Local Time: May 17, 2017 6:49 PM
UTC Time: May 17, 2017 4:49 PM
From: [email protected]
To: Frederic Crozat <[email protected]>, [email protected]
[email protected], [email protected]

Le mercredi 17 mai 2017 à 14:55 +0000, Frederic Crozat a écrit :
> Le mer. 17 mai 2017 à 16:02, Ernestas Kulik <[email protected]> a
> écrit :
> > (Attempt no. 2, since Geary hates me)
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > As the current licensing situation in Nautilus is quite
> > complicated, I
> > and Carlos are planning a move to relicense the entire codebase to
> > GPLv3+.
> >
> > The codebase has files under several licenses: LGPLv2+, GPLv2+ and
> > GPLv3+, the latter implicitly making the project be licensed under
> > its
> > terms, so our options are quite limited here.
> >
> > The situation wrt extensions is also not entirely clear, as the
> > extension library is LGPLv2+ with Nautilus being GPLv2+, which in
> > turn
> > disallows loading non-free extensions. Given the fact that it is
> > not
> > meant to be a generic mechanism for loading extensions, I feel like
> > relicensing it without much consideration is reasonable.
>
> I know at least one proprietary extension for Nautilus (integration
> with Synology NAS product) and I'm not sure we should prevent
> proprietary extensions to be used for Nautilus.

You can just mimic Totem exception clause. This is used to allow
proprietary GStreamer plugins.

https://git.gnome.org/browse/totem/tree/COPYING#n345

regards,
Nicolas_______________________________________________
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