Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Matt Turner <mattst88@g.o>
To: Ulrich Mueller <ulm@g.o>
Cc: gentoo development <gentoo-dev@l.g.o>, licenses <licenses@g.o>
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Adding 'GPL-2-only', 'GPL-3-only' etc. license variants for better auditing
Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2019 00:04:02
Message-Id: CAEdQ38FSUNpDvJeVOGLmvYLRcSr40Ot0YcxyOWzYX7Ln8a1vrA@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Adding 'GPL-2-only', 'GPL-3-only' etc. license variants for better auditing by Ulrich Mueller
1 On Sat, Sep 21, 2019 at 4:46 PM Ulrich Mueller <ulm@g.o> wrote:
2 >
3 > >>>>> On Sun, 22 Sep 2019, Matt Turner wrote:
4 >
5 > > An idea to consider: use SPDX license identifiers (see
6 > > https://spdx.org/licenses/)
7 >
8 > > For GPL 2 they are "GPL-2.0-only" and "GPL-2.0-or-later"
9 >
10 > Yeah, they have a history of using silly names. What does 2.0 mean?
11 > There is no such version of the GPL, and with Gentoo versioning rules,
12 > 2 is not equal to 2.0.
13 >
14 > Another funny thing is that they first introduced a "+" operator, but
15 > then decided not to use it for the GPL family, but append "-or-later"
16 > instead. (And IIUC, "GPL-2.0-only+" is valid in their scheme and
17 > equivalent to "GPL-2.0-or-later".)
18
19 Yes, from the page I cited it seems that they decided that
20 differentiating with only a '+' character was a bad idea -- the exact
21 thing MichaƂ is suggesting we stop doing.
22
23 > Release 3.0 replaced previous Identifiers for GNU licenses with more explicit Identifiers to reflect the "this version only" or "any later version" option specific to those licenses. As such, the previously used Identifiers for those licenses are deprecated as of v3.0.