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

["Kevin F. Quinn" <kevquinn@gentoo.org>]

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On Sun, 24 Dec 2006 18:05:48 +0000
Stephen Bennett <spb@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 22 Dec 2006 21:56:54 +0100
> "Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò" <flameeyes@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
> > GPL-2:
> > Note: this license states that the software is licensed under GNU
> > General Public License version 2, and you might not be able to
> > consider it licensed under any later version.
> > 
> > GPL-2+:
> > Note: this license explicitly allows licensing under GNU General
> > Public License version 2 or, at your option, any later version.
> > 
> > Comments, ideas, proposals?
> 
> From a purist point of view, I'd be inclined to go with this route.
> Pragmatically though, given the number of packages that do have the
> "or later" clause compared to the number that don't, it might be
> simpler to split them into GPL-2 (implying "or later") and
> GPL-2-only. That's just a possible naming quibble though -- the idea
> I like.
> 
> The suggestion to convert all GPL-2-or-later packages to || ( GPL-2
> GPL-3 ) won't scale -- what happens when GPL-2.1 or GPL-3.1 appear?
> It's also an awful lot of work for something that is, when you get
> down to it, wrong.

I agree.  Diego's proposal works fine in practice; the 'might not' in
the description for GPL-2 makes it clear that we don't guarantee to
have updated all existing ebuilds to use the GPL-2+ name where
appropriate.

Doing it on an opportunity basis should be fine, so I don't think we
need to worry about doing GPL-2-only.  Saying GPL-2 when GPL-3 is also
acceptable isn't critical in the near term; it won't cause people to
install stuff with a license they don't accept. It won't really be
needed until someone wants to have GPL-3 stuff but no GPL-2-only stuff
- I think it's reasonable to avoid supporting that for a while, at
least.  If we start now, with all new commits having GPL-2 changed to
GPL-2+ if appropriate, after a while we can change the GPL-2
description to be GPL-2 only and let GPL-3-only people (there's
always one) bug about packages that are still unchanged when they hit
them.

-- 
Kevin F. Quinn

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