GNU's healthy now, and will soon be moreso [LWN.net]

GNU's healthy now, and will soon be moreso

Posted Sep 27, 2013 19:26 UTC (Fri) by southey (subscriber, #9466)
In reply to: GNU's healthy now, and will soon be moreso by hummassa
Parent article: 30 years of GNU

All of your examples are illegal! These all require changes in the license especially as each change further restricts the original license. You cannot relicense any code unless you are the only copyright holder.

While you could redistribute the package under a different but compatible license, it is would be wrong include all included code under that compatible license. Rather the original program will always remain GPL v2 or later and only your patch will be covered under the compatible license you choose.

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GNU's healthy now, and will soon be moreso

Posted Sep 27, 2013 22:19 UTC (Fri) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

You are not relicensing. You are distributing under the terms the copyright holders allowed you to distribute. Go read all the terms of the GPLv2 and v3 a couple of times and you'll get some illumination after some time.

GNU's healthy now, and will soon be moreso

Posted Sep 27, 2013 22:33 UTC (Fri) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

I will clarify this a little bit:

When you say:

"You can redistribute this work (and derivatives) under the terms of the GPL, version 2 or later", then you are saying:

A. you can redistribute this work (and derivatives) under the terms of the GPLv2
B. OR you can redistribute this work (and derivatives) under the terms of the GPLv3
C. OR you can redistribute this work (and derivatives) under the terms of the GPLv3.1

and so on.

If you need to redistribute some work that is a derivative of both a GPLv2 work (terms under letter A, above) and a GPLv2+ work (A|B|C|...), you still have the option of distributing it under the terms of A. Likewise, if you need to redistribute some work that is a derivative of both a GPLv3+ work and a GPLv2+ work (B|C|... and A|B|C|... respectively) then you still have the option of distributing it under the terms of B|C|... etc etc.

GNU's healthy now, and will soon be moreso

Posted Sep 27, 2013 22:26 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

There's no legal problem.

The only way to distribute a combination of v2+ and v3+ is to abide by v3 (or a later version when one is published). So it's fair to tell people that the project "is under v3". It's simplifying slightly, but not to the extent of being misleading.

To be precise, the project doesn't have a licence. The works (authors' works) have licences.

(If I unilaterally claimed that every part of the project, including the v2+ parts written by others, was v3+, or if I edit all the other authors' copyright notices to say v3+, then yes, either of those acts would be illegal, but that's not the case here.)