Re-licensing of GPLv3

Posted Mar 29, 2007 12:32 UTC (Thu) by knewt (subscriber, #32124)
In reply to: Re-licensing of GPLv3 by jec
Parent article: The third GPLv3 draft

You can't actually take GPLv2 code and relicense it to GPLv3, as the two licenses are incompatible. However, most (but certainly not all) GPLv2 software has this bit of text at the top of its license:

you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version.

The Linux Kernel is one piece of software which explicitly doesn't have that, thereby (deliberately) tying it to v2 only.

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