[aur-general] Licenses, GPL3 only

[Philipp Überbacher]

Excerpts from Ray Rashif's message of 2010-08-23 21:56:29 +0200:
> 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

Thanks, nice to see where it started. All clear now.
-- 
Philipp

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