Re: GPL vX or later issue
Richard Fontana
On Tue, Nov 09, 2010 at 12:10:13PM -0800, dmg wrote:
Don't confuse a conjunction of terms with a disjunction. GPLv2 and<delurking> Actually, it is not inherently clear whether "GPLv2 or any later version" licensing is meant to be conjunctive or disjunctive, but it is my sense that the majority view in the open source developer community is that it is disjunctive. By that I mean, if I get some "GPLv2 or later" code, I can redistribute it under "GPLv2 or later" (which is what is done 99% of the time), or (by revising the license notices) "GPLv2 only", or (by revising the license notices) "GPLv3 only" [or "GPLv3 or later"]). As a historical example, in ~2006 active developers of BusyBox acted on the assumption that "GPLv2 or later" was disjunctive, and made some effort to alter license notices to say "GPLv2 only". Bruce Perens, one of the early developers of BusyBox, objected to this, arguing that GPLv2, in requiring preservation of license notices, prevents the removal of the "or later" choice. See: http://lwn.net/Articles/367058/ The FSF's position is that "GPLv2 or later" is disjunctive, precisely like a "MPL 1.1 or LGPL 2.1" dual license, and there was some effort in GPLv3 to clarify that. - RF
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