Licenses?

Posted Oct 10, 2011 16:14 UTC (Mon) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
In reply to: A Plumber's Wish List for Linux by jra
Parent article: A Plumber's Wish List for Linux

Perhaps they just don't trust the FSF to respect the philosophy of the license they are comfortable with. The whole GPLv3 fracas showed clearly that this can be the case.

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Licenses?

Posted Oct 10, 2011 23:39 UTC (Mon) by jra (subscriber, #55261) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm old enough to remember when the GPLv2 was beyond the pale and considered pure evil and communism (which is only a dirty word in the USA, and possibly China :-), no commercial company could *possibly* work with code under such a horrible and business-unfriendly license.

My, how times have changed. The same will happen with GPLv3 (probably after GPLv4 is announced :-)

If you don't trust the creators of the license, who do you trust to maintain it ? Do you think it doesn't need maintenance ? I know several lawyers in proprietary software companies that would disagree with you on that fact.

Licenses?

Posted Oct 11, 2011 0:19 UTC (Tue) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (1 responses)

At least as far as I understand many Linux authors, they are fine with GPLv2 and don't agree with GPLv3, won't give up their copyright (or other rights, including the "change the license" right) to anybody within the Linux community, and definitely will never give the "change the license" right to somebody outside said group. Just remember the flamewars that erupted when it was suggested to move Linux to GPLv3.

Licenses?

Posted Oct 12, 2011 22:13 UTC (Wed) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

And FWIW, there's nothing saying an author could not later relicense their own code as GPLv4, if v3 changes they didn't approve of were rolled back...

Strictly speaking, you're supposed to distribute the code under the version of the license it came with, but if a sole developer later relicensed his code under a newer license, and you took the old package from a 3rd party under that newer license, I'd be hard pressed to see anyone give you crap about it...