From f4d6524b9819e3881f873ce7a21d10ca5f7995d9 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: =?UTF-8?q?Frederik=20=E2=80=9CFreso=E2=80=9D=20S=2E=20Olesen?= Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2017 11:45:15 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] Add note about licensing to README.md Picard itself is licensed under the GPLv2 which means that any plugins written specifically for Picard might be argued to be under GPLv2 themselves due to GPLv2's viral nature, either due to being derived from Picard to some extent, or due to linking to Picard at runtime. To avoid any legal issues (and to make sure we have the rights to distribute and change plugins for the future) the added sentence declares that new plugins to the repository should be under a GPLv2-compatible license (ie., a license "more free" than GPLv2 is also acceptable). Also, be declaring it as "new plugins" the statement is "grandfathering" plugins already in the repository. Ideally these plugins should eventually get sorted out (see also https://github.com/metabrainz/picard-plugins/issues/5 ), but this should at least be something we can point new contributors to so we don't make the current license mess worse. :) --- README.md | 2 ++ 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 508a6c3d..4663488d 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -2,6 +2,8 @@ This repository hosts plugins for [MusicBrainz Picard](https://picard.musicbrainz.org/). If you're a plugin author and would like to include your plugin here, simply open a pull request. +Note that new plugins being added to the repository should be under the GNU General Public License version 2 ("GPL") or a license compatible with it. See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html for a list of compatible licenses. + ## Development Notes The script `generate.py` will generate a file called `plugins.json`, which contains metadata about all the plugins in this repository. `plugins.json` is used by [picard-website](https://github.com/musicbrainz/picard-website) and Picard itself to display information about downloadable plugins.