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

[Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org>]

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>>>>> On Sat, 21 Sep 2019, Michał Górny wrote:

> I'd like to propose to employ a more systematic method of resolving this
> problem.  I would like to add additional explicit 'GPL-n-only' licenses,
> and discourage using short 'GPL-n' in favor of them.  The end result
> would be three licenses per every version/variant, e.g.:

>   GPL-2-only -- version 2 only
>   GPL-2+     -- version 2 or newer
>   GPL-2      -- might be either, audit necessary

To elaborate a bit more on this: "GPL-2" already has that well defined
meaning that your proposed "GPL-2-only" has, namely that the package is
licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2.

Presumably, your change would cause a long transition time, in which we
would have *three* variants for every GPL version (as well as LGPL,
AGPL, FDL), two of them with identical meaning. And after the transition
time, we would have "GPL-2-only" instead of "GPL-2", which is not only
longer but also not accurate.

Plus, it would result in paradoxical entries like "|| ( GPL-2-only
GPL-3-only )" for a package that can be distributed under GPL versions 2
or 3 but no later version.

If the goal of this exercise is to do an audit of ebuilds labelled as
"GPL-2", then a less intrusive approach (which I had already suggested
when this issue had last been discussed) would be to add a comment to
the LICENSE line, either saying "# GPL-2 only" for packages that have
been verified. Or the other way aroung, starting with a comment saying
that it is undecided, which would be removed after an audit. This would
have the advantage not to confuse users, and have no impact on their
ACCEPT_LICENSE settings. (For example, some people exclude AGPL and
would have to add entries for AGPL-3-only.)

Ulrich

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