On Thu, Dec 13, 2007 at 03:06:27PM +0100, Holger Levsen wrote: > And yes, if you refer to "the GPL" today, it certainly means GPL3.
Not at all. Well, at least not completely. ;-) GNU GPL 3 itself says
about this (section 14):
If the Program does not specify a version number of the GNU
General Public License, you may choose any version ever
published by the Free Software Foundation.
(Version 2 says this as well, by the way, in section 9.)
> > Are now all packages buggy that reference
> > /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL instead of GPL-2 because GPL now
> > points to GPL-3?
>
> Yes.
Only if they are "GPL 2 only". GPL 3 is a valid license for a GPL2+
licensed work. It might be better to reference both version 2 and 3,
but referencing version 3 is certainly not wrong.
> > the GPL symlink should be removed alltogether to avoid similar
> > issues when the next GPL version comes along.
>
> Yes.
Or we could define what it should be used for. :-) I think it is
reasonable to use it to refer to the latest version of the license for
GPL*+ licensed programs. As in:
This program is released under the GNU General Public License,
version 2 or any later version. Version 2 can be found in
/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2 ; The latest version of the
license can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL .
Or something like that.
IANAL, TINLA.
Thanks,
Bas
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