Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Yuri Vasilevski <yvasilev@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] GPL-2 vs GPL-2+
Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2006 23:20:20
Message-Id: 20061222171707.54b060fe@dukebook.lan
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] GPL-2 vs GPL-2+ by "Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò"
1 On Fri, 22 Dec 2006 23:31:04 +0100
2 "Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò" <flameeyes@g.o> wrote:
3
4 > On Friday 22 December 2006 22:53, Yuri Vasilevski wrote:
5 > > While for the ones that support v2 or later (this is actually a
6 > > special case of multiple licensing) we do:
7 > >
8 > > LICENSE="GPL-2 GPL-3"
9 > >
10 > > when it becomes available?
11 > There is one problem at least for this: to apply this method you'd
12 > have to change _all_ the ebuilds in the tree referring to GPL-2 or
13 > later when GPL-3 is published, while with GPL-2+ we can start
14 > gradually now.
15
16 Yes, this will require us to update ebuils once in like 5 (or 15?)
17 years to catch with FSF. But at the benefit of having less confusion
18 for users about "What the heck is a GPL-2+?" for at last the same period
19 of time.
20
21 GPL-2 is not a licence nor it is not a standard notation for that way
22 of having multilicencing. So users will have to check what's the
23 meaning of that + at the end of GPL-2+, so I think it'll create much
24 more confusion than the work of updating packages with each new version
25 of GPL.
26
27 Also there could be a case that softer v3 is out, FSF will rethink and
28 come up with something acceptable to Linus (and other people that
29 refuse to migrate), as (as far as I can understand) GPL-3 will not be
30 compatible with GPL-2. So there could be the case of having a package
31 licenced under GPL-2, GPL-2.1 or later. (This is just an example, I
32 actually have no idea whatever this will be the case of having a softer
33 GPL-3.x.)
34
35 > Also it would be more useful for users to know what can be licensed
36 > in 2+ and what requires 2 strictly.
37
38 This info can be easily and automatically extracted from LICENSE
39 variable by applying some boolean logic ;-)
40
41 Yuri.
42
43 --
44 gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list

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