On Sun, 24 Dec 2006 18:05:48 +0000 Stephen Bennett wrote: > On Fri, 22 Dec 2006 21:56:54 +0100 > "Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò" 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