Re: [gentoo-dev] GPL-2 vs GPL-2+

[Yuri Vasilevski <yvasilev@gentoo.org>]

On Fri, 22 Dec 2006 23:31:04 +0100
"Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò" <flameeyes@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Friday 22 December 2006 22:53, Yuri Vasilevski wrote:
> > While for the ones that support v2 or later (this is actually a
> > special case of multiple licensing) we do:
> >
> > LICENSE="GPL-2 GPL-3"
> >
> > when it becomes available?
> There is one problem at least for this: to apply this method you'd
> have to change _all_ the ebuilds in the tree referring to GPL-2 or
> later when GPL-3 is published, while with GPL-2+ we can start
> gradually now.

Yes, this will require us to update ebuils once in like 5 (or 15?)
years to catch with FSF. But at the benefit of having less confusion
for users about "What the heck is a GPL-2+?" for at last the same period
of time.

GPL-2 is not a licence nor it is not a standard notation for that way
of having multilicencing. So users will have to check what's the
meaning of that + at the end of GPL-2+, so I think it'll create much
more confusion than the work of updating packages with each new version
of GPL.

Also there could be a case that softer v3 is out, FSF will rethink and
come up with something acceptable to Linus (and other people that
refuse to migrate), as (as far as I can understand) GPL-3 will not be
compatible with GPL-2. So there could be the case of having a package
licenced under GPL-2, GPL-2.1 or later. (This is just an example, I
actually have no idea whatever this will be the case of having a softer
GPL-3.x.)

> Also it would be more useful for users to know what can be licensed
> in 2+ and what requires 2 strictly.

This info can be easily and automatically extracted from LICENSE
variable by applying some boolean logic ;-)

Yuri.

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