Re: Bug#431109: [PROPOSAL] Disambiguate of Section 12.5, Deprecate GPL/LGPL symlinks (original) (raw)

Anthony W. Youngman wrote:

In message 87d4zdrhs7.fsf@mid.deneb.enyo.de, Florian Weimer fw@deneb.enyo.de writes

But do we really want to license everything which is "GPL version 2 or later" under the GPL version 3?

Actually, YOU CAN'T.

The only person who can CHANGE the licence is the person who owns the copyright.

Technically you are of course correct. Debian cannot relicense somebody else's software unless the license grants sublicensing rights.

In this case however the copyright holder gives prospective licensees a choice: "you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version."

The recipient of the software thus can elect to use GPLv2's or GPLv3's terms. This is not sublicensing or relicensing, it is simply choosing between one of the offers included by the licensor. It's just like the "GPL or 'commercial'" dual licensing used by e.g. MySQL or Trolltech.

Debian needs a license in order to distribute the software. Debian can elect to distribute under the terms of the GPLv3. However to give the user more choice, I would suggest that Debian tries to use GPLv2 whenever possible.

Arnoud (IAALBINYL)

-- Arnoud Engelfriet, Dutch & European patent attorney - Speaking only for myself Patents, copyright and IPR explained for techies: http://www.iusmentis.com/ Arnoud blogt nu ook: http://blog.iusmentis.com/

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