[gentoo-dev] Re: Why are ebuilds licensed GPL v2 only (no later version)?

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Ulrich Mueller posted on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 10:36:49 +0100 as excerpted:

> Apparently licensing of the Gentoo repository was changed from GPL-2+
> to GPL-2 (only) in 2002, see for example [1] and [2]. I cannot find any
> announcement or discussion about this.
> 
> Who was around in 2002 and still remembers what was the rationale?
> 
> Ulrich
> 
> [1]
> https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo/historical.git/commit/skel.ebuild?
id=e67af11c176e4dca33846e65c2649aa456de3099
> [2]
> https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo/historical.git/commit/header.txt?
id=dc4dfe8aa903fb467e648da80f8bc3178411a77a

I wasn't around in 2002, but I was researching it by late 2003 and began 
installing in early 2004, by which point Gentoo was suffering the 
aftermath of the bitter split with Zynot and DRobbins was pretty much out 
after having set up the Gentoo Foundation and (what became the) Council.

The Zynot side was focused on embedding and trying to take things 
commercial, while accusing DRobbins of trying to do effectively the same 
thing but with a(n IIRC) gaming focus.

That war has long since been fought and history has played out with 
Gentoo still around and Zynot... not, so I'll try to avoid inserting 
opinion /too/ much (tho I'm sure more recent events played out how they 
did in part due to that history, people around then simply weren't 
interested in what must have sounded rather similar), but...

The switch to GPLv2-only would have been made in the fight for its life 
that was the Gentoo/Zynot fork, and almost certainly had to do with 
trying to ensure that the gentoo/x86 tree could not be taken private 
without community recourse, in an era before GPLv3 existed and there was 
some uncertainty about what its legal terms were going to be, while those 
of the GPLv2 were known, it had broad community support, and was at 
least /somewhat/ legally tested.

Of course as we know it's possible for an entity owning copyright on a 
GPLed work to also sell the rights to use it commercially, with the GPL 
preventing others from doing the same, and that's what both sides were 
accusing the other of trying to do, but as we've seen play out in other 
contexts, the one thing the GPL /does/ do is provide a guarantee that the 
code as-is will remain free, and community improvements to it without a 
CLA letting the entity trying to take it proprietary are then disallowed 
from being used to further that entity's plots.  With the uncertainty 
surrounding the still coming GPLv3 at that point, I believe the intent 
was to ensure that continued.  OTOH, those on the Zynot side would surely 
argue that the intent was to ensure that Zynot couldn't take it private, 
while Gentoo/DRobbins could, especially since at the time copyright was 
assigned to Gentoo.  Of course now we have the advantage of looking back 
it it in history and can see how things turned out, but back then, it was 
far less clear how things would turn out.

-- 
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"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman