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).

I first thought that in order to be allowed to incorporate GPL 3.0 code, Rockbox could be re-licensed under GPL “version 2 or later”[1]. However this is not true: the Rockbox project would need to upgrade to GPL 3.0[2].

If Rockbox moved to GPL 3.0, this would prevent incorporating LGPL (all versions) code, unless it would consist in linking to an existing library. However, there seems to be an way around this: existing code needs to be ported to Rockbox anyway, so a the new port branch can be re-licensed under under GPL 3.0. Apparently, this is allowed[3] since LGPL 2.1.

Otherwise there's always the WTFPL[4] aka "DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE" :)

Regards, Dan

[1]
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#v2v3Compatibility

[2]
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing#GPLCompatibilityMatrix

[3]
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing#Footnote7

[4]
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/WTFPL

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