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Distribution: Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, Fedora, Ubuntu
Posts: 13,597
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Relicensing Dolphin: The long road to GPLv2+
Quote:
Since its resurfacing as an open source project in 2008, Dolphin has been licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2). This license, created in 1991, is still a fairly common license used in the open source world. But as with anything that deals with technology, times are changing at a rapid rate. More recent projects are using GNU Public License version 3 and Apache 2.0, for their additional freedoms, protections from outside liability, and improved inter-license compatibility. Unfortunately these newer licenses are not compatible with GPLv2, and any project using these licenses cannot link to Dolphin and thus, Dolphin cannot link to them.
Back in 2008, GPLv3 had just come out and most projects were GPLv2, so licensing the project GPLv2 seemed like the smartest decision at the time. Since then, one of Dolphin's original founders, ector, has repeatedly mentioned how he regrets licensing Dolphin under GPLv2 instead of GPLv2+. GPLv2+ allows a later version of the GPL license to be substituted in place of GPLv2. This includes new licenses as they are released, so while GPLv2+ only means GPLv2 and GPLv3 right now, it will include GPLv4 onward once they're released. This gives a project a lot of leeway when linking with other software that a static license does not. Case in point, ector recently relicensed another extremely successful emulator he founded, PPSSPP, under GPLv2+.
Though many knew that licensing issues were inevitable, relicensing was repeatedly shelved so everyone could remain focused on improving the emulator. And for many many years, GPLv2 was perfectly fine for Dolphin with licensing issues staying out of the way of development.
Licensing problems jumped to the forefront of development early last year when it was brought to our attention that Dolphin's Android builds were linking to Apache 2.0 licensed APIs. As noted, Apache 2.0 is not compatible with GPLv2. The Free Software Foundation cited that "the patent termination and indemnification provisions as restrictions not present in the older GPL license." This meant that we were technically in violation of our license even though we weren't aware of it until that point.
A minor maintenance pull request was cancelled in order to prevent more licensing issues while bigger decisions needed more time. This left a dark cloud hovering over Dolphin's Android release with only two options; either relicense the whole project or the Android version had to be scrapped. It took years of development to get it this far after fighting immature drivers, weak hardware and other limitations in order to bring GameCube/Wii emulation to Android devices. To see a roadblock such as this come up just as chipsets are getting to the point where they can run games at full speed was a brutal wakeup call.
Similar incompatibilities were discovered within Dolphin making the situation much more urgent. The Qt5 frontend would be limited, as newer modules are not compatible GPLv2. Other new features, including Virtual Reality support, would be nearly impossible to implement without relying on libraries that could not be used under the current licensing situation. The situation had finally reached a tipping point.
Distribution: Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, Fedora, Ubuntu
Posts: 13,597
Original Poster
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MAME has long been freely available, but it's never been completely Libre. Instead, it's been available under a modified BSD license that prohibits commercial use of the code, among other things. They are now moving to a true Open Source license.
Just in case anyone else is confused, this thread is about Dolphin the emulator for Nintendo video game consoles (of which I hadn't heard until now), not Dolphin the excellent KDE file browser (which I use daily).
I got quite excited at the idea of the latter being built for Android!
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