Source: http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/tag/LGPL
Timestamp: 2015-05-25 19:17:51
Document Index: 218655885

Matched Legal Cases: ['art 3', 'art 1', 'art 2', 'art 3', 'art 2', 'art 1']

LGPL - Yet another blog for JBKempf
Keyword - LGPL
Monday, March 10 2014 First achievement unlocked!
By Jean-Baptiste Kempf on Monday, March 10 2014, 23:42 - VideoLAN
56 trackbacks Monday, June 24 2013 VLC for Android and LGPL
By Jean-Baptiste Kempf on Monday, June 24 2013, 19:23 - VideoLAN
This is just a very short post (almost a bookmark-post) to share that we finished the releasing of the VLC engine on Android to LGPL.
This is now live in the release that was done today, named 0.1.2.
It mostly includes:
the Java code in the org.videolan.libvlc namespace,
the jni code gluing between libVLC and the Java code.
The corresponding commits are here and there.
This should allow to use the VLC engine in any other application on Android.
But be warned: so far, it is very difficult to build Tuesday, November 20 2012 How to properly(?) relicense a large open source project - part 3
By Jean-Baptiste Kempf on Tuesday, November 20 2012, 17:06 - VideoLAN
Wednesday, November 14 2012 I did it!
By Jean-Baptiste Kempf on Wednesday, November 14 2012, 00:26 - VideoLAN
Hello HN: you should really read part 1, part 2 and part 3 about this change.
This afternoon, I finished the relicensing of most of the code of VLC to LGPL, like promised:
VLC modules LGPL commit.
You should read my posts on this subject.
Thanks to all VLC contributors, especially the important ones!
Last year, I also did the VLC core LGPL commit.
Thursday, November 8 2012 How to properly(?) relicense a large open source project - part 2
By Jean-Baptiste Kempf on Thursday, November 8 2012, 23:57 - VideoLAN
As you might know, or might have read, I am spending a lot of my time to relicense libVLC, aka VLC engine, from GPL to LGPL.
This is a continuation of the LGPL posts, please read the previous post, if you have not done it already.
So, I had a list of contributors on the parts I was considering to relicense, thanks to the previous work.
Cleaning the contributors list
This huge list was dumped in a spreadsheet, using LibreOffice. I used during all the relicensing with crazy big formulas to keep my status up-to-date.
While I thought curating the list was useless, it revealed very important, since some developers use pseudonyms or change e-mail addresses. I thought my list was already unique in the past, but it was not.
Of course, a lot of emails were invalid, so manual corrections where necessary.
During the core relicensing of VLC, an important number of users allowed us to relicense all the VLC code, so I had to mark them as such in the spreadsheet.
For each group of modules, I had a different blame log, since the complete relicensing seemed too big a task, and logical groups could be relicensed individually.
Then, with an export of the csv, the raw blame.log, a bit of awk, grep, cut, I had a list of people remaining to mail. This list would get update, after every batch of answers.
The next step is the obvious one, mailing the developers. I did that with a small Python script made by Ludovic.
This was a short letter, with explanations and a prototype for an answer.
I have mailed no more than 30 contributors in a single batch, because processing the answers (or lack of) could be quite long.
Answers and reactions
In average, the answers were like this:
25% of the emails just bounce,
15% of people answer positively during the next hours,
10% of people answer positively during the next days,
50% do not answer at all.
After a second and a third mail, I usually got around 50% of positive answers.
A few points are interesting:
People answering fast were usually the ones that were GPG-signing their mails (this was asked in the LGPL letter).
Quite a few people were surprised that I would mail them ("I only wrote one small commit", "This was minor code").
Many people explained me they did not care what license the code was under, as long as it was open source. Some of them gave a full VLC relicensing authorization. Two even gave all the transmittable rights to VideoLAN.
A few people thanked me for taking the task of relicensing.
Finding and stalking
Now is probably the harder part, where you will think I am crazy.
So, after the first part, we get usually half of the answers. We need the other half.
For the bouncing emails, finding quickly an updated email online, fixing the videolan aliases solved many issues.
Techniques for stalking
The first ones are obvious:
Ask older contributors, especially for people from Ecole Centrale Paris for contact
Use google (most of the time, it gives a link to VLC, though)
Look on freecode, github, gitorious for an alternative contact
Find a website (they are geeks!).
Some are a bit intrusive
Use LinkedIn and ask for an introduction
Create an account on another weird social network
Ask one of their friends and annoy them
Ask their boss.
Or clearly bad:
Find their phone in a Phone Directory
Use whois on some of their domain
Use whois on a domain hosted on the same machine of their domain
Go to their workplace.
Then, I used IRC, mails on multiple addresses, phones, fax and other means to get them to mail me.
Over, over, over and over, and over.
This could get really annoying to do, to be honest.
At some point, you realize that some of the contributors are not going to answer.
So, now, you need to actually analyze their code contributions and starting working on it.
First, is there code still in place and not deleted? Is the license LGPL, by any chance?
Then, is this module very important? Can we drop its priority?
Then, is this feature important or not?
And then, I deleted some code, reverted some commits, rewrote some and or isolated code from them in a separate files to reduce the future impact.
This is not nice? Well, not answering is not nice either.
You can read the last part about this relicensing.
Wednesday, November 7 2012 How to properly(?) relicense a large open source project - part 1
By Jean-Baptiste Kempf on Wednesday, November 7 2012, 15:31 - VideoLAN
There are quite a few good reasons to do so, some more obvious than others, but notably competition, necessity to have more professional developers around VLC and AppStores. Other reasons also exist, but this is not the place and time to discuss those.
This is a crazy task, because every developer keeps all its rights, and VideoLAN has little rights on VLC. This involves contacting a few hundred developers, some who were active only 10 years ago, some with bouncing mails, and people spread across continents, countries, languages, OS...
Yet, I did it. Here is the first part of how I did it...
Copyright, droit d'auteurs, public domain and VLC.
As all VideoLAN projects, like x264 or DVBlast, VLC is governed under the French law, even if some don't like this fact.
This means, we are not under a copyright system, but under an author rights system. As such, every author has moral rights and patrimonial rights. The first ones are nontransferable while the later ones can be transfered to another legal entity. This is quite different from copyright.
Moreover, this explains why public domain is not a valid concept for everyone on this planet.
Unlike a lot of large open source projects, authors of VLC keep all their rights on their code, even if the code is minimal. Therefore, to change the license, one must contact every author, even small contributors. From a community management point-of-view, this also makes sense :).
VLC authors, core and modules
VLC is split in several parts, but most of the code is in the core or in some modules.
The core, that was successfully relicensed last year, involved around 150 developers and 80000 lines of code, and the very vast majority of the code was done by two dozens of people, most of whom I have not lost contact with.
The modules are a different piece of cake.
Even, if we concentrate on the playback modules, which I did, we speak here of 300 developers and 300000 lines of code and the repartition is distributed more evenly.
Listing the right people
The first step, which is the most important, is to correctly list the authors.
This would seem simple from an external point of view, but it is not, mostly because there was no split between authors and commiters in the CVS and SVN days. Moreover, some code was stolen imported from Xine or MPlayer... And sometimes, the author is not even credited in the commit log.
And this should be the time were you think I am completely crazy.
To get a proper listing of contributors, I used 3 things:
grep, awk
on our vlc git repository.
The first obvious thing to do, is to use git blame on all the files you care, so you know, lines-by-line who actually wrote the code, even after code copy, code move or re-indentation.
I ran it, with extra protection, like this:
git blame -C -C -C20 -M -M10 -e $file.
Of course, as some Git expert told me, this should have been enough:
git blame -C -C -M -e $file
but I preferred to be extra-safe.
The second obvious thing to do, was to check all the logs on the specific modules folder or file, in case :
someone did some commits on one module
the code was quite changed, so blaming does not find it
yet the idea behind the code is the same.
This solves what I call the authorship leak.
git shortlog -sne $file was used for that task.
Finally, some people where only mentioned in the commits logs or just had their names in the final file.
For this, I grepped "patch", "original" "at", "@" in the commit logs.
I also grepped the author sections of every file to check if there were any other author missing.
After those steps, I had a quite accurate list of people to contact. I'll skip you the de-duplicating step, because this is obvious and boring.
The next posts will be about how I contacted and found people, and how they did react.
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