Bruce Perens: State of Open Source [LWN.net]

Bruce Perens: State of Open Source

Posted Apr 10, 2006 6:43 UTC (Mon) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510)
In reply to: Bruce Perens: State of Open Source by sepreece
Parent article: Bruce Perens: State of Open Source

But using the "later version" language makes it easy to fix the problem if your license text has a legal problem that needs to be corrected. And it does that without your having to do odious things like require copyright assignment or get a separate right to relicense from every contributor.

If you're going to use that "later version" language, the FSF is one of the organizations that would be easiest to trust. It's a legal non-profit with a leader who literally dedicates his life to Free Software, something I won't do, and a damn good lawyer. I've actually been opposing expert to Moglen in a case, he's really good. Too bad the case sealed and you won't read about it.

Yes, Richard is hard to get along with. But everything he forecast in the eighties is coming true around us today. Maybe he'll be right again.

Bruce

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Bruce Perens: State of Open Source

Posted Apr 10, 2006 18:44 UTC (Mon) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270) [Link]

I'm not sure that you can get a functionally useful "repair" through the "or later version" clause, because it never takes away the "GPLvX or" part. That is, that language allows a downstream recipient to apply the terms of any license included, so the repair could not override the version that had the problem.

On the other hand, that same fact vitiates the concern I expressed, since licensing something as GPLv2 or later always allows the more liberal terms of GPLv2 to be used as well as the more restrictive terms of a later version (assuming some later version is more restrictive, as the first draft of GPLv2 is). I had failed to think that through.

So, using the "or later version" language would be a problem if you objected to some later version making the terms more liberal, but not if you objected to some later version making the terms more restrictive.