Excerpts from Ray Rashif's message of 2010-08-23 21:56:29 +0200:
On 23 August 2010 20:47, Magnus Therning <magnus@therning.org> wrote:
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.
s/released/was in planning/
Linux has been GPL2-only since Linus realised he didn't like what was going to come, as quoted [1]:
"Why? There's been some discussions of a GPL v3 which would limit licensing to certain "well-behaved" parties, and I'm not sure I'd agree with such restrictions - and the GPL itself allows for "any version" so I wanted to make this part unambigious as far as my personal code is concerned."
This started the "GPLn-only" trend. The so-called standard the wiki mentions was only discussed after the distribute-GPL-sources fiasco [2], but I could be wrong. Before that, very few people actually bothered to note the differences between a GPL and a GPLn license, using "GPL" to refer to both. This is evident on a more prominent scale from the LKML discussion.
I don't know of any software besides the kernel having a GPL2-only license, but there probably are. It is perfectly valid, but I don't think it warrants any kind of discussion or standard yet. Like mentioned, use:
custom:GPL3-only
[1] http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0009.1/0096.html [2] http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/5355
Thanks, nice to see where it started. All clear now. -- Philipp -- "Wir stehen selbst enttäuscht und sehn betroffen / Den Vorhang zu und alle Fragen offen." Bertolt Brecht, Der gute Mensch von Sezuan