New copyright policy explained

On 2018-09-15 meeting, the Trustees have given the final stamp of approval to the new Gentoo copyright policy outlined in GLEP 76. This policy is the result of work that has been slowly progressing since 2005, and that has taken considerable speed by the end of 2017. It is a major step forward from the status quo that has been used since the forming of Gentoo Foundation, and that mostly has been inherited from earlier Gentoo Technologies.

The policy aims to cover all copyright-related aspects, bringing Gentoo in line with the practices used in many other large open source projects. Most notably, it introduces a concept of Gentoo Certificate of Origin that requires all contributors to confirm that they are entitled to submit their contributions to Gentoo, and corrects the copyright attribution policy to be viable under more jurisdictions.

This article aims to shortly reiterate over the most important points in the new copyright policy, and provide a detailed guide on following it in Q&A form.

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Overriding misreported screen dimensions with KMS-backed drivers

With Qt5 gaining support for high-DPI displays, and applications starting to exercise that support, it’s easy for applications to suddenly become unusable with some screens. For example, my old Samsung TV reported itself as 7″ screen. While this used not to really matter with websites forcing you to force the resolution of 96 DPI, the high-DPI applications started scaling themselves to occupy most of my screen, with elements becoming really huge (and ugly, apparently due to some poor scaling).

It turns out that it is really hard to find a solution for this. Most of the guides and tips are focused either on proprietary drivers or on getting custom resolutions. The DisplaySize specification in xorg.conf apparently did not change anything either. Finally, I was able to resolve the issue by overriding the EDID data for my screen. This guide explains how I did it.

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