selfoss Verify license of selfoss contributions

The README and other documents state:

selfoss was created by Tobias Zeising and it is licensed under the GPLv3 license.

But it is not clear if this was meant to be only version 3 of the license, or also allow later versions of GPL, as strongly recommended by GNU foundation – people often use this phrasing, considering the upgradability obvious.

See also https://gnu.org/licenses/identify-licenses-clearly.html

In order to clear up this uncertainty, we will need the past contributors to confirm if they are fine with licensing their contribution under GPL 3 or later, or remove their contributions.

cc @SSilence @niol

» Checklist of selfoss contributors who agreed with licensing their contributions under GPL 3+ «

Sep 14 '20 12:09 jtojnar

👍 version 3 and newer are perfect!

Sep 14 '20 13:09 SSilence

Also note that this only concerns the license of the source code of selfoss itself. The license of the resulting application bundle will depend on the licenses of our dependencies and we will need to do a audit to figure it out :scream_cat:

And just to be clear and explicit:

I agree with licensing my contributions to selfoss under GNU GPL 3 or any later version.

Sep 14 '20 15:09 jtojnar

At least the Weblate translations are marked GPL3+ so that reduces the fraction of contributors we need to ask.

Sep 16 '20 18:09 jtojnar

GPL3+ is good for me.

Sep 16 '20 18:09 niol

Hi, I made some commits back in the day ( https://github.com/fossar/selfoss/pull/632 , https://github.com/fossar/selfoss/pull/605 ) but my emails written in a different format, and until just not not associated with my github account - that is why I didn't show up here. This might be the case for others, too, so we might have to extend that list by checking whether there are unassociated email addresses?

Anyway, for the actual change, I'm +1 for GPL3+.

Sep 26 '20 21:09 dubbl

@dubbl Right, I noticed that too, and started to compile a list of e-mails but cannot really post it here and have it on the other computer. Anyway, I made few GraphQL requests using the following query on https://developer.github.com/v4/explorer/ and got seven JSON documents.

{
  repository(owner: "fossar", name: "selfoss") {
    pullRequests(first: 100, after: "…",) {
      nodes {
        author {
          login
        }
        url
        id
      }
      pageInfo {
        endCursor
        startCursor
        hasNextPage
      }
    }
  }
}

Then I slurped them using cat contributions.json | jq -s 'map(.data.repository.pullRequests.nodes) | [.[][]] | group_by(.author) | map([.[0].author.login, [.[].url]])' and got the new list. Unfortunately, I cannot include it into the opening issue since that many links break GitHub.

Hopefully, no one contributed using different method than pull requests or Weblate, I have no idea how to cross-reference it easily.

Sep 26 '20 22:09 jtojnar

I agree with licensing my contributions to selfoss under GNU GPL 3 or any later version.

Sep 27 '20 16:09 Weishaupt

In order to clear up this uncertainty, we will need the past contributors to confirm if they are fine with licensing their contribution under GPL 3 or later

Yes, go ahead.