[kde-community] KDE Relicensing Effort

[Boudhayan Gupta]

On 28 July 2015 at 01:44, David Faure <faure at kde.org> wrote:
> On Monday 27 July 2015 15:01:06 Marc Mutz wrote:
>>
>> I meant that I prefer the "or later" clause to be present, not and don't like
>> a relicense to v[23]-only.
>>
>> No difference atm, only once there's a GPLv4, it will be automatically
>> permitted on v2+, but not on v[23]-only.
>
> Right, but that's just a preference then, not a refusal for v[23]-only.
> If one of the other contributors to a v2-only file says the opposite
> (v[23] yes, v2+ no), then I would still be able to relicense that file
> to "v2 or v3", since that is allowed by your more permissive "v2+", right?
>
> Otherwise the file would have to stay v2-only, which surely is worse
> in your book, right?
>

Say there's two contributors to a file, contributor A has specified
gplv23 ONLY and contributor B has specified gplv2+ ONLY. If I were to
draw a Venn Diagram of all the licenses allowed by A and by B, the
intersection would contain GPLv3. So GPLv3 would be allowed.

Once GPLv4 comes along, contributor B has allowed it by default, but A
has not. Again in the intersection, GPLv3 would be present, but not
GPLv4.

But under no circumstances would you ever be stuck on GPLv2 only.

This is my non-lawyer logic.

-- Boudhayan Gupta