Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Adding 'GPL-2-only', 'GPL-3-only' etc. license variants for better auditing

[Matt Turner <mattst88@gentoo.org>]

On Sat, Sep 21, 2019 at 4:46 PM Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> >>>>> On Sun, 22 Sep 2019, Matt Turner wrote:
>
> > An idea to consider: use SPDX license identifiers (see
> > https://spdx.org/licenses/)
>
> > For GPL 2 they are "GPL-2.0-only" and "GPL-2.0-or-later"
>
> Yeah, they have a history of using silly names. What does 2.0 mean?
> There is no such version of the GPL, and with Gentoo versioning rules,
> 2 is not equal to 2.0.
>
> Another funny thing is that they first introduced a "+" operator, but
> then decided not to use it for the GPL family, but append "-or-later"
> instead. (And IIUC, "GPL-2.0-only+" is valid in their scheme and
> equivalent to "GPL-2.0-or-later".)

Yes, from the page I cited it seems that they decided that
differentiating with only a '+' character was a bad idea -- the exact
thing Michał is suggesting we stop doing.

> Release 3.0 replaced previous Identifiers for GNU licenses with more explicit Identifiers to reflect the "this version only" or "any later version" option specific to those licenses. As such, the previously used Identifiers for those licenses are deprecated as of v3.0.