Dear VOLK community,

we are writing to let you know that we are working towards a new major release of VOLK. The possibly biggest change will be that we intend to use a different license for this release: VOLK 3.0 shall be licensed under the LGPL 3.0 (or later). To do this effectively, we will need your help, should you agree. If you are already aware of this effort and are in support, you can skip to "What are you asking from contributors?" below, but we recommend you read this letter in its entirety to make sure you understand our intentions and process.

Thanks for your support!

Why are we doing this?

In retrospect, LGPL would probably have been the better choice for VOLK from the get-go. The FSF recommendations on libraries states that "If developers are already using an established alternative library released under a nonfree license or a lax pushover license, then we recommend using the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).".

We agree with this recommendation, and want to avoid VOLK being a SIMD library exclusively used by GNU Radio (and a few others), while other software packages rally behind other SIMD libraries, that are more liberally licensed.

We could have chosen an even less restrictive license, but we are believers in copyleft, and believe the LGPL strikes the right balance between not restricting users in which types of software they may use VOLK, and requiring users to continue upstreaming their modifications to VOLK.

How are we going to do this?

Relicensing codebases is a complex process, full of potential pitfalls. To avoid any misconceptions, ambiguities, or legal issues, we have decided to go for the nuclear option: We will delete all of VOLK, and start from scratch, using the LGPL from the beginning of VOLK 3.0. It would be a futile attempt to try and recreate the decades of work that went into previous versions of VOLK without violating the VOLK 2.0 license. We are therefore asking all contributors to re-grant us permission to include their code, previously submitted into VOLK versions 1 and 2, into the newly licensed VOLK 3. The process for contributors is simple (see below), but first, we want to explain how this works.

For contributing to VOLK 2.0, most of you signed a CLA, granting the copyright to the FSF. This CLA includes a paragraph stating that the FSF grants back to the developer the rights to use their contributions as they see fit.

We cannot copy code from VOLK 2.0, since that is GPL licensed. But we can ask you to resubmit your contributions to VOLK 3.0, which is LGPL licensed. And that's what we're asking you to do in this letter. The process to do so is really simple and will be explained shortly.

Once your previous contributions are re-submitted, the copyright will fall back onto the original authors.

What's going to happen to VOLK 2?

VOLK 2 will remain GPL-licensed. We may choose to continue supporting it with bug fixes, but the main development focus will lie on VOLK 3 going forward.

Will there be other changes in VOLK 3.0 other than the license change?

The roadmap for VOLK 3.0 is not yet fully laid out, but we are considering making some API-breaking changes in VOLK 3 along with the relicensing. At the moment, we consider approaches to fix complex data type incompatibilities between C and C++.

What are you asking from contributors?

To grant us permission to use your contributions under the LGPLv3+ license for VOLK 3.0, we ask that you sign the paragraph HERE. You can do this either by submitting a pull request against THIS FiLE, adding your name and email address as they appear in previous commits. Alternatively, you can send us an email, in which you state that you've read and understood the following paragraph, and we will add your name on your behalf. You should have received an email asking for code re-submissions.

There is no need to submit pull requests with your previous submissions. Once you have agreed to re-submit your code to VOLK 3, we will pull your submissions out of git history and apply them to the VOLK 3 branch under the new license on your behalf.

Should you not wish to re-use your contributions for VOLK 3, we understand and respect that, and will not include your code in future versions of VOLK. For logistical purposes, it would be very helpful if you still respond and let us know about your decision, so we can more easily track how many contributors are in agreement with this change.

Relicensing Agreement (this goes into the repo)

This statement goes into the commit message.

I, {contributor name}, hereby resubmit all my contributions to the VOLK project and repository under the terms of the LGPL-3.0-or-later.

My GitHub handle is {github handle}.

My email addresses used for contributions are: {email address}, ... .

I hereby agree that contributions made by me in the past, to previous versions of VOLK, may be re-used for inclusion in VOLK 3. I understand that VOLK 3 will be relicensed under LGPL-3.0-or-later.