On Thu, Sep 06, 2001 at 12:55:38AM +0200, Jakob B. Jensen wrote:
> If /usr/share/doc/foo/copyright says "You may use this package
> according to /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL or any later
> version" (Or a similar vague statement relying on a specific
> contents of that symlink), changing GPL to point to GPL-3 could
> cause future uploads to be "automatically" relicensed.
Please file bugs against such packages; they should say something
much more like:
This program is free software; 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.
[...]
On Debian GNU/Linux systems, the complete text of the GNU General
Public License can be found in `/usr/share/doc/common-licenses/GPL'.
Then there is no contradiction or implicit relicensing when the
symlink eventually changes, just that people will find version 3 by
default, not version 2.
There is more difficulty with packages which say "distributed under
the GNU GPL" without any version specification.
Julian
--
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, Queen Mary, Univ. of London
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://people.debian.org/~jdg
NEW: Visit http://www.helpthehungry.org/ to do just that
