> Come on, if the FSF (the copyright holder) distributes a program, > and if the included licence says GPLv2+, then the licence is GPLv2+ > and you'll have a really hard time trying to convince anyone that > it's different.
The problem isn't convincing somebody it's *different*, but to convince them that there's a reason the license is what it supposedly says it is! It's critical to understand that copyright and license agreements in files have *no legal significance whatsoever* except *possibly* to try to establish what was in the mind of the author. It's likely true that if they FSF were to "distribute" software in the sense of mailing somebody a CD and there was no license on paper, you could *probably* indeed rely on the license within the CD as being definitive. But if there's some random file floating around that somebody claims was copied from a site that somebody else claimed was maintained by the FSF and you start relying on a notice in *that* file as definitively saying what the license is, you're on *much* shakier legal grounds and most attorneys would not be comfortable with it. > BTW: the copyright holder is free to take a GPLv3 patch and > release it under GPLv2 (and any other licence). True, but irrelevant, as I said in my previous email: a patch is a derived work of the file it patches, so there's not much real meaning in talking about the license status of a patch in isolation.
