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

["Haelwenn (lanodan) Monnier" <contact@hacktivis.me>]

[2020-02-11 10:52:57-0500] Rich Freeman:
> On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 10:05 AM Haelwenn (lanodan) Monnier
> <contact@hacktivis.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.

Absolutely, I misunderstood that the FLA wasn't ready at all, it's 
much better to have it instead.

> 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.

Which happens a lot when you have do to anything with others, and is
quite how using the internet and free software sounds like to me.

Anyway, this FLA document generator looks really good to me, much better 
than a weird "or later" on a license.
FSF/OSI sounds a bit too much flexible but personally I think I can 
trust gentoo enough to pick a similar license and otherwise it seems to 
restricts flexibility a bit too much. At least the option of GPL-2+ but 
with the change control put to gentoo would be possible.