On 11/9/10 11:28 AM, Radcliffe, Mark wrote:

I think that this approach will create confusion. First, I estimate that 99.9% of all GPL licenses are version or later, so most users of SPDX will assume that GPLv2 is GPLv2 or later.

I think we have a slight mis-match it terms. There is not even one GPL license that is "version or later". Each version of GPL is that version, and no other version, of GPL. "

A lot of content is licensed under some version of GPL or any later version. IOW, a lot of content is licensed under GPLv2 or GPLv3 (or GPLv4 or 5 should such licenses ever be created). In the "or later version" scenario the user get to choose which of those licenses they prefer.

Unless we can make this very clear, it will be very confusing. I am open to other ways of solving this problem.

We definitely need to make it clear what licenses are in play. But we also need to be precise. Conflating the relationship between a file and it's licenses with the licenses themselves reduces both clarity and precision.

I think having an "version or later" license set is best way to handle this. Perhaps we could predefine some common "version or later" license sets (such as GPv2OrLater) to improve the simplicity and clarity.

Peter