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GPLv3GPLv3Posted Apr 21, 2009 13:31 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263)In reply to: GPLv3 by mjg59 Parent article: Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun
Linus has left open the decision to (try to) move to a later GPL version. (It will still be a legal tough job to find all people, tho.)
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GPLv3 Posted Apr 21, 2009 21:22 UTC (Tue) by csamuel (✭ supporter ✭, #2624) [Link]
[Sigh - ENOCOFFEE.. meant to be following on from the comment on finding
all contributors and say]
..especially the dead ones.. :-(
GPLv3 Posted Apr 23, 2009 3:02 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link]
If a developer dies, then the copyrights would be passed on to their heirs. It'd still be possible to change the license, but the new copyright holder might not be as interested.
GPLv3 Posted Apr 23, 2009 8:39 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
So has anyone ever asked an actual lawyer about this? If a large project with very widely distributed ownership, makes every reasonable effort to locate its current owners as well as to widely publicise a pending licence change, and if years later a very small percentage of copyright holders crawl out of the wood-work and object, would a judge really rule in favour of those few, against the thousands?
I don't know the answer, but the implied answer assumed all the time by Linux kernel folk seems to take it as given that the courts would be surprisingly unpragmatic.
GPLv3 Posted Apr 30, 2009 9:08 UTC (Thu) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link] It is only necessary to find those copyright owners who explicitely said they were only supporting GPLv2. The "GPLv2 only" tag in the COPYING file from Linus is only telling you that "the whole work is GPLv2 only by least common denominator". AFAIK, all GPLv2-only proponents are vocal and easy to track down. Large parts of the kernel are GPLv2 or later, and so can be changed to GPLv3 without asking the copyright holders of those parts (e.g. the ALSA team). Of course it is a lot easier to switch to GPLv3 or later if you were GPLv2 or later before. Been there, done that. Simply changing the COPYING file is sufficient.
GPLv3 Posted Apr 30, 2009 10:40 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
No - given that the default assumption in the kernel is that it's GPLv2, it's the ones who explicitly say GPLv2 or later who are the exception. Patches to any files that are v2 only are also v2 only. Large parts of the kernel may be v2 or later, but the majority is v2 only. It follows that you have a large number of copyright holders to find.
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