On 10 Sep 2009, at 08:35, Anthony W. Youngman wrote:
"Or later" will admit later restrictions, "or latest" will impose
them quietly on old sources.
BINGO!
And this is EXACTLY the problem with your suggestion. You are
RETROACTIVELY CHANGING THE LICENCE!
As has been pointed out elsewhere, this will have the effect of
making what was legal, illegal. What happens if v4 comes out and Joe
Bloggs never hears about it? He was happily distributing under v3
perfectly legally, now he's happily distributing under v3 ILLEGALLY.
As with all copyrights, one will have to check with the owner of the
copyright the conditions valid at the distribution conditions are at
the time of distribution. Recall that nowadays copyrightable material
becomes copyrighted without any copyright notice or registration.
The idea with a copyright license is to simplify the procedure.
I'm not a lawyer, but if I came across "v2 or latest" wording, my
advice would be to treat it as "v2 only" because to do anything else
IS TOO DANGEROUS. So your wording is self-defeating because no sane
distributor would dare take advantage of the "or latest" clause.
That seems to be the case: at least for new restrictions, "or later"
essentially useless.
So it is probably simplest to just update the license when you have
time. All these GPLs are probably reasonable for LilyPond
Hans
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