[rfc] change copyright text to gplv2 or v3
John Arbash Meinel
john at arbash-meinel.com
Fri Oct 5 15:51:49 BST 2007
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Matthieu Moy wrote:
> Aaron Bentley <aaron.bentley at utoronto.ca> writes:
>
>> You certainly could argue that your proposal doesn't make it impossible
>> to use Bazaar with GPL4, since Canonical has the copyright, and can
>> change the license. But it does lead to additional complications. What
>> about old versions of Bazaar? Would they be retroactively re-licensed?
>> What if Canonical becomes unresponsive to the community?
>
> I'd add:
>
> What if someone other than Canonical wants to link Bazaar with
> (hypothetical) GPLv4?
>
Well, going by what Martin was saying... Do we know we want to allow that
before we've ever even seen GPLv4.
Overall, I would guess the answer is yes. But just from a pragmatic point of
view. The FSF holds copyright on a fairly large body of work, and is certainly
going to maintain it at the newest version.
But I can understand the cause for concern. Just note that:
a) We can't retroactively relicense released code. So bzr <= 0.91 will be
available under v2 and all later ones. So a group *could* fork at that point if
Canonical wasn't responsive.
b) There is a lot of other code that it v2 or later, so if the FSF got a bit
crazy, there would be a lot of people affected.
John
=:->
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