[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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