David Hedlund <public@...> wrote:

The text "or any later version" was introduced in these licenses:

Just for the historical record, the formal text has always "any later
version", going back to GPLv1....

J Lovejoy wrote:

The somewhat recent change to using “or-later” as part of the identifiers
for the GNU family of licenses was done with heavy input and at the request
of the FSF. ... the identifiers are not going to change again, nor do they
need to.

...However, shorthand for "or any later version" has been "or-later" since at
least 1996 when I first encountered it while doing GPL compliance work as a
volunteer for the FSF. I suspect the shorthand of "or-later" to mean "or any
later version" probably predates even that year.

SPDX identifiers are designed to be industry-standard shorthand for license
names, and thus SPDX's recent change to use "LICENSE_NAME-or-later" for GNU
licenses finally makes SPDX consistent with the well-agreed shorthand that
predates SPDX. It's an excellent change and there is no reason to change it
again, IMO!
--
Bradley M. Kuhn

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