GCC drops its copyright-assignment requirement

Posted Jun 2, 2021 13:41 UTC (Wed) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152)
In reply to: GCC drops its copyright-assignment requirement by pizza
Parent article: GCC drops its copyright-assignment requirement

It could be turned the other way around: given that the changes in GPLv3 resulted in a non-negligible amount of significant projects to hard-stick to v2 and many others to v2+, what's the point of v3 ?

GCC drops its copyright-assignment requirement

Posted Jun 2, 2021 17:03 UTC (Wed) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (3 responses)

The point of the GPL v3 was to add a bunch of new terms to the license that FSF thought weren't adequately dealt with by GPL v2. The biggest ones were an explicit patent license and the anti-Tivoization clause. If those things matter to you, you probably need to use GPL v3 rather than GPL v2.

GCC drops its copyright-assignment requirement

Posted Jun 2, 2021 18:45 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

Plus some internet bugfixes. The classic fix is the requirement to "make source available for 3 years".

In the old v2 days, that meant you distributed source and binary together on CD or tape, or you forced the user to download everything in a single bundle, if you didn't want to trigger that requirement. Under v2, if you had source and binary as two separate downloads, it triggered the requirement to keep the source available for three years.

Under v3, if you make source and binary available as separate downloads, and the user doesn't bother downloading the source, it's their lookout if you take the site down.

There's another such bugfix that I know of but can't remember ...

Cheers,
Wol

GCC drops its copyright-assignment requirement

Posted Jun 3, 2021 21:00 UTC (Thu) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link] (1 responses)

With V3, non-commercial redistributors can relay the information they got on how to get corresponding source, instead of providing the corresponding source themselves. Is this what you were thinking of?

GCC drops its copyright-assignment requirement

Posted Jun 3, 2021 22:16 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I don't think so ...

But yes, that is a convenient change.

Cheers,
Wol