Re: [gentoo-dev] Should we allow "GPL, v2 or later" for ebuilds?

[Haelwenn (lanodan) Monnier]

[2020-01-30 08:19:08-0500] Rich Freeman:
> On Thu, Jan 30, 2020 at 6:20 AM Haelwenn (lanodan) Monnier
> <contact@×××××××××.me> wrote:
> > [2020-01-27 12:41:26+0100] Ulrich Mueller:
> > > So, the question is, should we allow ebuilds
> > > # Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, v2 or later
> > > in the repository, or should we even encourage it for new ebuilds?
> > >
> > > I have somewhat mixed feelings about this. One the one hand, I think
> > > that GPL-2+ should generally be preferred because it offers better
> > > compatibility. For example, the compatibility clause in CC-BY-SA-4.0
> > > won't work with GPL-2.
> >
> > Is there another reason for GPL-2+ than just compatibility?
> > Because I quite find the "or later" thing to be quite a scary one as
> > whatever will come up next as a GPL will become applicable and it feels
> > quite weird to me to have a license that can evolve to whatever
> > license over time.

> Really the main threat (IMO) is that the code could be de-copylefted.
> They could make GPL v4 a copy of the BSD license, and now anything
> that was v2+ is effectively BSD and can be used in non-FOSS software
> without issue.  I guess that isn't any worse than the previous case of
> it instead being merged into some other v4 variant that you can access
> the source for but prefer to avoid because of something else in the
> license, except now you might not see the code at all.

Yeah, I quite share this opinion/view, with also the scary wonder of
who can author a GPL-4 license as there doesn't seems to be any
restriction for this in the license, just a "or later".

> Another solution to this problem is the FLA - which is something we've
> talked about but shelved until we've sorted out some of our other
> copyright issues which were thorny enough.  Perhaps we could consider
> taking that up again.  Without getting into the details it is a bit
> like a copyleft-style copyright assignment, which isn't actually an
> assignment.  We envisoned it being voluntary and would allow any
> contributor to give the Foundation the authority to relicense their
> contributions, with a number of restrictions, like the new license
> being FOSS.  I'd have to dig up the latest version and take a look at
> it again.  Basically instead of trusting the FSF you'd be trusting the
> Foundation instead, but there are some limitations on what they'd be
> allowed to do, and if they violate those limitations the agreement
> would be canceled and the rights would revert back to whatever was on
> the original contribution, which would probably be whatever the author
> originally wanted.  That said, I'm not sure it really provides a whole
> lot more protection over what happens except for the fact that
> Foundation members have more say in how the Foundation operations than
> the FSF, if only because the number of people allowed to vote are
> limited to a relatively small pool Gentoo contributors, at least
> compared to the entire FOSS community.

I guess the FLA would be really interesting to have to get the quite 
useful flexibility of relicensing but keeping it to Gentoo Foundation 
to avoid giving this flexibility to everyone.

Maybe it could for now be a simple agreement on putting your code to 
the Gentoo Foundation under the GPL-2+ but it would be published under 
the GPL-{2,3,…}?