[aur-general] Licenses, GPL3 only

[Ray Rashif]

On 23 August 2010 20:47, Magnus Therning <magnus at therning.org> wrote:
> 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.

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


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