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The following came up in #gentoo-qa yesterday, in a discussion between |
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mgorny, soap and myself. |
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|
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Historically, all ebuilds in the Gentoo repository were licensed under |
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GPL-2+. At a later point they were relicensed [1] to GPL-2. See [2] for |
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a rationale (or absence of it, YMMV). |
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|
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However, in GLEP 76, GPL-2+ is listed as the first choice for licensing |
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of any Gentoo project [3]. Also, I am not aware of any official policy |
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that would forbid the "v2 or later" variant for ebuilds (any pointers |
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are welcome). |
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|
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So, the question is, should we allow ebuilds |
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# Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, v2 or later |
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in the repository, or should we even encourage it for new ebuilds? |
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|
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I have somewhat mixed feelings about this. One the one hand, I think |
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that GPL-2+ should generally be preferred because it offers better |
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compatibility. For example, the compatibility clause in CC-BY-SA-4.0 |
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won't work with GPL-2. |
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|
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On the other hand, we would presumably never achieve a complete |
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transition to GPL-2+, so we would have ebuilds with either GPL variant |
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in the tree. Not sure how big an issue that would be. Updating ebuilds |
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wouldn't be a problem (as the old header would stay), but devs would |
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have to spend attention to the header when copying code from one ebuild |
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to another. |
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|
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Note that we could easily revert from GPL-2+ to GPL-2 if it would turn |
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out to be too much trouble. |
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|
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Thoughts? |
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|
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Ulrich |
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|
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[1] https://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/articles/a-short-history-of-gentoo-copyright.html#relicensing-to-gpl-2 |
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[2] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/7a857384b8929cb930329eb59e27636a |
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[3] https://www.gentoo.org/glep/glep-0076.html#licensing-of-gentoo-projects |