I forgot to link to an initiative from FSFE for those interested in best practices for documenting the licence of Free and Open Source projects:
https://reuse.software/ Cheers, Javier On Wed, Aug 22, 2018 at 12:02 PM, Javier Serrano < [email protected]> wrote: > Hi Steve, some comments inlined below: > > On Wed, Aug 8, 2018 at 4:13 PM, Steven A. Falco <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> I'm packaging KiCad for Fedora. The web page: >> http://kicad-pcb.org/about/licenses/ states that KiCad is GPLv3 or >> greater. Yet, the source files (for example eeschema/edit_bitmap.cpp) >> still say GPLv2 or greater. >> > > Some source files are GPL2-or-later (aka "GPL2+"), some others (e.g. the > P&S router) are GPL3-or-later (aka "GPL3+"). With a GPL2+ header you are > telling the licensee (s)he is free to take a given file as GPL2 or any > later version, which at this point in time can only mean GPL3. With a GPL3+ > header you are telling licensees they can take the file as GPL3 and, in the > future, if it ever exists, GPL4 and so on. Because GPL3 files cannot > coexist with GPL2 files in the same project, the only way for legally > distributing the whole project is to interpret GPL2+ files as released > under GPL3, a permission which the copyright holder explicitly granted by > including the "or later". This is what is meant by "GPL3" when describing > the licensing regime of the whole project. > > >> >> I know it is a huge hassle to go through all the source files and update >> them to say GPLv3 or greater, but that probably should be done if GPLv3 is >> truly the intent. >> >> > Going through that process is not needed for the reasons I exposed > earlier. It is also quite impractical, because the only person allowed to > change a copyright and licensing header in a given file is the copyright > owner, and that, for KiCad, means a lot of people, some of whom might even > be hard to reach today. > > Cheers, > > Javier >
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