Re: [arch-general] [arch-dev-public] [aur-general] Licenses, GPL3 only

On 26 August 2010 06:23, Ray Rashif wrote:

On 26 August 2010 19:16, Roberto Alsina wrote:

...

On Thursday 26 August 2010 08:12:23 Ronald van Haren wrote:

...

My second point was that we don't know what the future will bring. Will new applications being licensed under GPL2 or later, GPL3 or later, GPL4, GPL4 or later... there are lots of options. There are lots of possibilities and I'm wondering if it is at all feasible to create a naming scheme which will fit all.

Sure:

GPL2 GPL2+ GPL3 GPL3+ etc.

For convenience, you may want to make GPL the equivalent of GPL2+

Here's what is currently being done:

ln -s GPL2 GPL

So in fact, we don't even have the text of the "only" version. Neither does the FSF.

There is no proper "example", "template" or "draft" for a GPLn-only license. For eg. the kernel has this in its COPYING:

<quote> NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel  services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use  of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work".  Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software  Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux  kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.

 Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel  is concerned is _this_ particular version of the license (ie v2, not  v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.

                       Linus Torvalds </quote>

That is the only difference between that license text and the one in /usr/share/common, i.e it is a special case, a GPL2 license with an "exception clause". Otherwise, both have exactly 2 occurences of "any later version".

== GPL2 == If we want to honour cases like that, we would have to encourage the inclusion of the license. So, our kernel should mention:

license=('custom:GPL2')

And include /usr/share/licenses/kernel26/COPYING. All cases of "custom" should naturally imply that there is a license text to check out.

All other "normal" GPL software should have:

license=('GPL')

Which needs no intervention.

== GPL3 == Now, because the texts of the GPL2 and GPL3 are different, we cannot, for eg. symlink anything to GPL3. But in the above manner, software like the kernel need to have:

license=('custom:GPL3')

And include /usr/share/licenses/foobar/COPYING.

While the rest of the GPL3 software can just have:

license=('GPL3')

== TL;DR == Basically, we just standardise the use of:

license=('custom:GPLn')

For software with GPL exception texts, and include the license. Only the kernel (and mysql? [1]) package needs to be changed to conform to this; nothing else needs to be done. Very "future proof", IMO.

[1] http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/01/04/mysqls-license-is-now-gpl-2-only/

-- GPG/PGP ID: B42DDCAD

From my understanding of copyright, it seems to me that we don't have to treat GPL2-only and GPL2+ works any differently. Both were distributed under the GPLv2, and can obviously be redistributed under

the same license. Whether a package decides to add the "or any later version" extension isn't really our problem; we correctly identify the licence under which the software was _actually_ released. If someone wants to relicense it, they can go and get the actual source (which they'll need anyway) and it'll say that they are free to distribute it under later GPL versions. But of course, IANAL. -- Tavian Barnes