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

[Rich Freeman]

On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 10:05 AM Haelwenn (lanodan) Monnier
<contact@×××××××××.me> wrote:
>
> 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,…}?
>

Well, if we were going to get people to start signing things I suggest
just sticking to the FLA since it actually was written by lawyers.

I attached a copy, but along these lines the key section is:
We agree to (sub)license the Contribution or any Materials containing,
based on or derived from your Contribution under the terms of any
licenses the Free Software Foundation classifies as Free Software
License and which are approved by the Open Source Initiative as Open
Source licenses.

That is, Gentoo would control the licenses, but they would have to be
FSF/OSI approved.  That doesn't mean that anybody could choose any
FSF-approved license - Gentoo would still have to do the licensing.
This is just a limitation on the grant of power from the original
author to Gentoo on WHAT licenses GENTOO can choose.

There is also a variant of the FLA that can further narrow down the
licenses that Gentoo gets to choose from, but IMO if you're going to
go down this path it makes sense to keep things flexible.  We could of
course just limit Gentoo to GPL v2+, and initially Gentoo does v2/3
and later Gentoo could revise to any later version of the GPL.  But if
for whatever reason the GPL falls out of favor then we can't adapt
futher.

Ultimately though anything like this involves giving up control.

For those interested in the FLA there is a license generator at:
http://contributoragreements.org/ca-cla-chooser/

You pick the terms (I used the defaults - which IMO are most
appropriate but not the only valid option).  It spits out an agreement
for you.


-- 
Rich