GCC drops its copyright-assignment requirement

Posted Jun 3, 2021 18:50 UTC (Thu) by ldearquer (guest, #137451)
In reply to: GCC drops its copyright-assignment requirement by Wol
Parent article: GCC drops its copyright-assignment requirement

Thanks for the reply. This was my view about copyright, but my actual knowledge about it is indeed minimal...

These all came in reply to madscientist:

> Worrying about the FSF relicensing GCC is not the problem; I don't think any serious person thinks that the FSF will publish a GPLvN which undermines free software. The problem is actually the opposite: once they start accepting code that is not copyright FSF, now you can NO LONGER change the license to GPLv4+ if you wanted to without getting permissions from all copyright holders. And even if you assume good faith by all contributors, once the first GCC contributor dies or disappears you're screwed unless you want to throw out all their code and rewrite it from scratch. This is not theoretical, it has actually happened in some projects.

My say on this is, even without copyright assignment, the FSF can relicense GCC to GPLv4+. This may be, formally, not a very straight forward process, but can be done.

I think you (and others) are right when saying this is not automatically done, because you are given the option to choose between GPLv3 or any later version. But "any later version" is not a license on itself, and you have to actually choose a real license.

But the FSF has this special power of creating a new license. So if GPLv4 was created, and it contained a provision such as (imprecise wording follows, but you get the point):

"If you received this work under a 'GPLv3 or later' clause, you may redistribute this work under a 'GPLv4 or later clause'"

Note this is not the same as choosing GPLv4+ as a subset of GPLv3+. You'd be choosing to comply with GPLv4 only, which is valid as long as it exists. And GPLv4 is granting you permission to relicense as GPLv4+

So the FSF can grant itself (and anyone really) the permission to relicense as they wish to, as long as it is published in GPLv4. I am not saying this as a bad thing, I think if you want to protect your code against future unforeseen loopholes in your license of choice..., you have to trust somebody

GCC drops its copyright-assignment requirement

Posted Jun 3, 2021 22:12 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> My say on this is, even without copyright assignment, the FSF can relicense GCC to GPLv4+. This may be, formally, not a very straight forward process, but can be done.

Actually, it's very simple ...

> I think you (and others) are right when saying this is not automatically done, because you are given the option to choose between GPLv3 or any later version. But "any later version" is not a license on itself, and you have to actually choose a real license.

Notice that NONE of the different GPLs themselves contain the wording "any later version". The accompanying blurb suggests you use that wording - but that goes into the GRANT of licence, the COPYING file.

> But the FSF has this special power of creating a new license. So if GPLv4 was created, and it contained a provision such as (imprecise wording follows, but you get the point):

> "If you received this work under a 'GPLv3 or later' clause, you may redistribute this work under a 'GPLv4 or later clause'"

The GPL1, GPL2, LGPL2.1, and GPL3 don't contain this wording, so I would be extremely surprised if GPL4 contained it. And it would be extremely divisive, because it would forbid GPLvX-only, like Linux is GPL2-only.

But ANYBODY could easily convert "GPL3+" to "GPL4+". You're reducing the list of available licences to a subset of the original, and all you need to do that is to make a copyrightable change to GCC, which gives you the right to change the COPYING file, and you can then change GPL3+ to GPL4+ there. Or you could change it to 3-only, or 4-only, or whatever you like so long as it's a subset of the original.

But if you do that, don't expect upstream to accept your changes unless they agree with it.

And a word of warning - if you try and slip such a change in un-noticed, either (a) your changes will be stripped out of upstream, or even worse (for you), (b) it's quite possible that upstream could go to a Judge and say "you tricked us into accepting it but it's against our licence policies, please will you relicence it to our standard"! If someone pulled that stunt on me, I'd certainly be prepared to try that if I could afford it!

Cheers,
Wol