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

On Sat, 28 Jul 2007, Florian Weimer wrote:

Andreas Barth aba@not.so.argh.org writes:

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

And how do we discriminate between "GPL version 2 or later" and "GPL version 3 or later"?

If it says "version N or later", we should of course point to the earliest version to give users the choice which version they want.

Wholeheartedly agreed. I don't understand the rationale for doing anything different.

Same here. My conclusion is that the GPL symlink should not be changed. Policy can still deprecate the symlink, but the actual content should not be update for GPLv3.

Well, we can't pretend that "the GPL" is GPL-2 forever, so it would be a bad idea to keep the GPL pointing to the old license.

The GPL is there for informative purposes only. Packages under GPLv2 or later will still be under GPLv2 or later, and the fact that we say "the latest GPL is in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL" in the copyright file should not be interpreted as a relicensing. Moreover, the GPL-2 will still be there as far as it's a "common license".

What is clear is that packages under GPLv2 (without "or later") should point to the GPL-2, not to the symlink. Packages not doing that are already buggy and we should start fixing them.

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