Bruce made no legal "demands" [LWN.net]

Bruce made no legal "demands"

Posted Oct 2, 2006 9:09 UTC (Mon) by atai (subscriber, #10977)
In reply to: Bruce made no legal "demands" by rsidd
Parent article: Busy busy busybox

They say "GNU General Public License", and the version would be by implication the then-current version of that licence; they do not say "or later"

This is wrong. There is no such implication and the original author's statement (as available in this case) is the only correct interpretion. Even of the whole project is v2 only, keeping the copyright notice as requested by the author is something to do out of basic respect and morality.

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Bruce made no legal "demands"

Posted Oct 2, 2006 10:07 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

Go back and read those messages. The copyright messages are being kept, unchanged, in the files where they belong. To remove them would be a violation of the GPL (any version). What Bruce "requests and requires" is not this, but additional text inserted in the licence file, saying that while busybox is licensed under GPLv2, those bits written by Bruce may also be licensed under GPLv3. Such a notice is not required by the GPL and Bruce cannot demand it.

Bruce made no legal "demands"

Posted Oct 2, 2006 18:25 UTC (Mon) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]

> What Bruce "requests and requires" is not this, but additional text
> inserted in the licence file, saying that while busybox is licensed
> under GPLv2, those bits written by Bruce may also be licensed under
> GPLv3.

I started the forensic analysis to figure out what actual code Bruce was
demanding these notices on. When I found out how little he actually did
in the first place (and that essentially none of it had survived into the
modern version anyway), I got kind of annoyed. (The initial objective
actually wasn't to remove his code, but it's hard to remove his code from
the project when he hasn't _got_ any.)

I find it odd that this is considered newsworthy...