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FSFE wants to better protect free software licenses from bankruptcyFSFE wants to better protect free software licenses from bankruptcyPosted Jul 30, 2012 16:49 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)In reply to: FSFE wants to better protect free software licenses from bankruptcy by Cyberax Parent article: FSFE wants to better protect free software licenses from bankruptcy
Most Free Software programs specify either a specific version of the GPL or a specific version "and any later version". So if Evil GPL4 comes out, it will have no effect. Any existing software users can continue operating under versions up to GPL3 and ignore Evil GPL4. Naturally, no new free software will pick Evil GPL4 as a license.
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FSFE wants to better protect free software licenses from bankruptcy Posted Jul 30, 2012 16:52 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
The problem is, $LARGE_CORP would still get access to all of the code under the "GPLv2/3 or later" license. It would be able to republish it under a proprietary license, for example.
And it won't be easy for projects to actually change "GPLv2/3 or later" to "GPL2/3" because it might require consent of many authors.
FSFE wants to better protect free software licenses from bankruptcy Posted Jul 30, 2012 16:58 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
actually, if they just include one patch that's GPL 2/3 then the result can only be distributed under those licenses.
Yes, $LARGE_CORP could go back to an earlier version, or could work to extract individual parts, but it wouldn't take long for this to be impractical.
This "pollution" of the codebase is why Busybox officially changed from GPLv2+ to GPLv2, they realized that they had included GPLv2 only code for quite a while and instead of trying to relicense or eliminate the GPLv2 only code they shifted the project license (and therefor by default the license of future contributions) to GPLv2
FSFE wants to better protect free software licenses from bankruptcy Posted Jul 30, 2012 17:09 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] I suppose that's true, but even assuming $LARGE_CORP could take Free Software and close it, the closed variant would wither and die, so there wouldn't be much point.
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