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Tomboy, Gnote, and the limits of forks

Posted May 4, 2009 12:32 UTC (Mon) by cate (subscriber, #1359)
Parent article: Tomboy, Gnote, and the limits of forks

No, you cannot *relicense* or *convert* GPL2+ code to GPL3. As in your
citation, people can *apply* GPL3, but to relicense need copyright holder.
(see also the last year LWN article about BSD to GPL driver in kernel)

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Relicensing

Posted May 4, 2009 13:31 UTC (Mon) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Perhaps my choice of terms was sloppy. That doesn't change the fact that Gnote is distributed under (and covered by) GPLv3 and no other license. It's a de facto relicensing, regardless of what you might want to call it.

One minor clarification: GPLv3+

Posted May 6, 2009 14:55 UTC (Wed) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link]

I have a minor clarification: the source files say version 3 or any later version, which would make it GPLv3+ in the notation cate was using. This in no way contradicts you point of course, but when you said "no other license" it made me curious enough to look it up.

Tomboy, Gnote, and the limits of forks

Posted May 4, 2009 13:50 UTC (Mon) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]

But you can relicense LGPL code to GPL though: the license specifically includes a clause allowing anyone to perform such a relicensing.