Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Matt Turner <mattst88@g.o>
To: gentoo development <gentoo-dev@l.g.o>
Cc: "Michał Górny" <mgorny@g.o>, licenses <licenses@g.o>
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: [RFC] Adding 'GPL-2-only', 'GPL-3-only' etc. license variants for better auditing
Date: Sat, 21 Sep 2019 22:02:00
Message-Id: CAEdQ38Ghd2XYNDAzTWkzwfdtsGOYvvOf7cwBxdugOEaH862XCg@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: [gentoo-dev] Re: [RFC] Adding 'GPL-2-only', 'GPL-3-only' etc. license variants for better auditing by Ulrich Mueller
1 On Sat, Sep 21, 2019 at 1:58 PM Ulrich Mueller <ulm@g.o> wrote:
2 >
3 > >>>>> On Sat, 21 Sep 2019, Michał Górny wrote:
4 >
5 > > I'd like to propose to employ a more systematic method of resolving this
6 > > problem. I would like to add additional explicit 'GPL-n-only' licenses,
7 > > and discourage using short 'GPL-n' in favor of them. The end result
8 > > would be three licenses per every version/variant, e.g.:
9 >
10 > > GPL-2-only -- version 2 only
11 > > GPL-2+ -- version 2 or newer
12 > > GPL-2 -- might be either, audit necessary
13 >
14 > To elaborate a bit more on this: "GPL-2" already has that well defined
15 > meaning that your proposed "GPL-2-only" has, namely that the package is
16 > licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2.
17
18 We are all aware. But the point is to explicitly put "-only" in the
19 LICENSE metadata so that ebuild authors are less likely to confuse
20 GPL-2 vs GPL-2+.
21
22 > Presumably, your change would cause a long transition time, in which we
23 > would have *three* variants for every GPL version (as well as LGPL,
24 > AGPL, FDL), two of them with identical meaning. And after the transition
25 > time, we would have "GPL-2-only" instead of "GPL-2", which is not only
26 > longer but also not accurate.
27
28 Sure, but who cares about a long transition time? We still have EAPI=0
29 ebuilds in tree -- and that's okay since we can quickly and easily
30 tell what hasn't been transitioned!
31
32 > Plus, it would result in paradoxical entries like "|| ( GPL-2-only
33 > GPL-3-only )" for a package that can be distributed under GPL versions 2
34 > or 3 but no later version.
35
36 That paradoxical entry is pretty clear to me.
37
38 > If the goal of this exercise is to do an audit of ebuilds labelled as
39 > "GPL-2", then a less intrusive approach (which I had already suggested
40 > when this issue had last been discussed) would be to add a comment to
41 > the LICENSE line, either saying "# GPL-2 only" for packages that have
42 > been verified. Or the other way aroung, starting with a comment saying
43 > that it is undecided, which would be removed after an audit. This would
44
45 It's not a one-time audit. Michał has a history of fixing things in
46 ways that does not allow the issue to return. I imagine that's what
47 he's doing here, and it would not surprise me at all if something
48 could be wired into CI to help ensure this.
49
50 > have the advantage not to confuse users, and have no impact on their
51 > ACCEPT_LICENSE settings. (For example, some people exclude AGPL and
52 > would have to add entries for AGPL-3-only.)
53
54 Trivial concern solved with a news item.

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