[ about modifying the license of "GPLv2 or later" or similarly licensed code ]
* Ralf Wildenhues wrote on Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 08:15:57AM CEST: > * Richard Kenner wrote on Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 12:17:47AM CEST: > > > > It's my understanding that FSF legal department has consistently refused > > > > to answer such questions as this. > > > > > > Do you have a quote for that, please? > > > > How do you quote somebody who DOESN'T answer? FYI, quoting Brett Smith on this issue (with permission) below. Cheers, Ralf When the copyright holder of a program gives you permission to "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," they have given you permission to distribute it under the terms of any one or more of the licenses specified. Distributing the work under GPLv2-or-later, GPLv3-or-later, GPLv2-only, GPLv3-only, and so on are all permitted. It works the same way as disjunctive dual licenses: just like you have the option of distributing Perl under the terms of the Artistic License, the GPL, or both, you can do similarly here. If the license grant did not work this way, it would be unable to accomplish its intended goal of easing license compatibility issues when new versions of the GPL are released. With that said: I don't advise taking a GPLv2-or-later program and distributing it under GPLv3-or-later just because you can. That may upset some upstreams, and in general I don't like to see licensing become a point of contention between development teams like this. If you make this change, please do it for a specific reason. There are plenty of good ones (e.g., you've made changes that you want to clearly be under GPLv3, you want future contributors to provide a patent license under section 11, etc.), but developers should ideally have a solid sense of which of them are relevant for their project. Also note that just because you receive a work under GPLv2-or-later and distribute it under GPLv3-or-later doesn't necessarily mean that the previous distributor has new obligations. For example, if you get some GPLv2-or-later source from a distributor that has a tivoized product, you can't distribute that source under GPLv3-or-later and then turn around and ask the previous distributor for Installation Information. They're only on the hook to meet the conditions in one of the licenses they chose, which in this case would be GPLv2.
