Excerpts from Magnus Therning's message of 2010-08-23 14:47:32 +0200:
On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 13:15, Philipp Überbacher <hollunder@lavabit.com> wrote:
Excerpts from Ray Rashif's message of 2010-08-23 12:47:44 +0200: [...]
The Linux kernel, IIRC, was made GPL2 only when GPL3 was released.
That may be, I don't know. If that was the case, then any version up to that point could be used with any GPL version, be it 3, 4, 5 ...
AFAIK Linux has been GPLv2 only since version 2.4.0, i.e. from January 4th 2001. Work on GPLv3 didn't start until late 2005.
Personally I think it's only prudent to know *exactly* what license SW I write is released under. So releasing under GPLv3 only before GPLv4 is released makes sense; I also think that applying licenses retroactively is troublesome, so it's worth being specific from the beginning.
OTOH it doesn't bother me at all that Arch's packaging system currently lacks a way of accurately specifying the license for some software. I think it's very little chance of that ever counting for anything in court. As long as upstream provide clear information the Arch package can say pretty much anything.
/M
I also doubt it has legal significance, but it would be good if the information we provide was accurate. I believe pacman still can't search by license, so it doesn't matter that much. Spreading inaccurate information is just annoying. One example I ran into a couple of times: A package description said: "provides <functinality> for GNOME" when it was in reality a gtk program without gnome dependencies. It also swings the other way around, but less often. Point being: accurate information helps the user, inaccurate information can be troublesome. -- Philipp -- "Wir stehen selbst enttäuscht und sehn betroffen / Den Vorhang zu und alle Fragen offen." Bertolt Brecht, Der gute Mensch von Sezuan