Planning for decades

Posted Mar 30, 2012 15:21 UTC (Fri) by mcoleman (guest, #70990)
In reply to: Planning for decades by sfeam
Parent article: A turning point for GNU libc

...then the result cannot be used under GPL2, only under GPL3

Of course. Why would you expect to be able to use someone else's code in a manner that they forbid? Microsoft won't let you do that either...

Planning for decades

Posted Mar 31, 2012 10:13 UTC (Sat) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (5 responses)

Part of the point of the GPL is "share and share alike" (or so it seems to me). GPLv3+'ing a derivative of a GPLv2+ project is, at best, shockingly rude, since it amounts to saying "I don't want to share with you" to the upstream maintainer.

Planning for decades

Posted Mar 31, 2012 11:41 UTC (Sat) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link] (4 responses)

Ah, but what if a GPL v3+ project decides to integrate a non-trivial part of your GPL v2+ code base into the larger GPL v3+ project, as sfeam suggested a few comments up?

For example, I'm making a GPL v3/v3+ paint program, and you wrote a nice chunk of GPL v2+ code for handling the whizzy new Frobnitz N-dimensional drawing tablet. Now I integrate your Frobnitz handling code into my paint program. The resulting application is GPL v3+. What's the point of GPL v2+ if not to allow such forward compatibility?

Sure, if I were to release a GPL v3/v3+ only application that was created by taking someone else's GPL v2+ app and adding only a little bit of GPL v3 code, that would be somewhat rude (unless I had the author's blessing), but entirely legit by the license. But sfeam's example had the sizes the other way around -- smaller GPL v2+ code subsumed into a larger GPL v3 / v3+ project. I don't think anyone should find that rude. (I almost said "I don't think anyone would find that rude," but I thought better of it. The Internet is a big place.) I imagine it happens with large GPL v3 projects somewhat regularly.

Speaking of which, aside from GCC, what are some somewhat large GPL v3 projects out there? Or did most everyone hang back with GPL v2/2+?

Planning for decades

Posted Mar 31, 2012 15:47 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

Looking through a repoquery on Rawhide, some of note (ignoring GNU projects):

- audacious
- swig
- claws-mail
- codeblocks
- gimp
- grub2
- mc
- mplayer
- rdesktop
- tryton

Planning for decades

Posted Mar 31, 2012 15:57 UTC (Sat) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link]

Cool. Looks like it has picked up at least a little steam outside GNU. I guess we'll see in 20 years whether it becomes as popular as GPL v2 did in its ~20 year run as the leading GNU license.

Planning for decades

Posted Apr 5, 2012 11:03 UTC (Thu) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

The Samba project enthusiastically supports GPLv3; IIUC their experiences with messy court cases, license enforcement, etc., were strong influences on GPLv3's design.

Planning for decades

Posted Apr 5, 2012 20:10 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

What you should do then (if you can) is to treat the GPL2 code like a LGPL2 library - keep it in its own section of the source tree, and leave it at GPL2+.

If you make major changes you can then decide whether to move it into the main GPL3 tree or not.

Cheers,
Wol