[aur-general] Licenses, GPL3 only

[Magnus Therning]

On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 13:15, Philipp Überbacher <hollunder at 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

-- 
Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
magnus＠therning．org          Jabber: magnus＠therning．org
http://therning.org/magnus         identi.ca|twitter: magthe