Hi all, I changed the subject to reflect the discussion and moved George to "to:" to get his attention.
Also, if we are going to make any chances as described below, I think they should be a separate series from the SPDX series. On Tue, 23 Aug 2022, Julien Grall wrote: > > > I am putting some thoughts below (they can be split in a separate thread > > > if you prefer). > > > > > > This is not the first time this topic is brought up and probably not the > > > last as long as we have file using GPLv2+. > > > > > > IIRC from past discussion there are two broads concern with GPLv2+: > > > - We are leaving the choice of which license applies to the person > > > copying the code. So if a new version is released that is less favorable > > > to the initial contributor, then we have no leverage. > > > - Some companies are rather cautious to contribute code that my be > > > licensed under GPLv3 (would be allowed with GPLv2+). > > > > > > The later is particularly a problem because not many people realize that a > > > fair part of Xen on Arm is GPLv2+. I never really understood why we chose > > > that (this was before my time) but this got spread as the existing > > > copyright was added to a new file. Admittely, the contributor should be > > > more cautious. But I would not say this is trivial to spot the difference. > > > > > > I would like to consider to re-license all the GPLv2+ files to GPLv2. > > > AFAIU, this would mean we would need to ask the permission for every > > > comapany that contributed to the file. Do you know if this was done before > > > in Xen Project? > > > > If I am understanding right, GPLv2+ means that someone could relicense the > > files to GPLv3 if he wants which is more restrictive. > > Why do you want to move those back to GPLv2 ? > The main difference between GPLv2 and GPLv3 is the patent section. This has > caused some concerns in the past when a stakeholder want to contribute to Xen > Project. > > While looking through at previous discussion, I found the original discussion > [1] which contains a lot more details. I agree with Julien. Also, I don't think that having GPLv2-or-later on a few source files is of benefit to anyone (if Xen was GPLv2-or-later as a whole it would be a different discussion). Moving from GPLv2-or-later to GPLv2-only is not a relicense. The "or later" statement is not part of the license itself. It would be limiting the choice of license to a subset of what is currently allowed: i.e. from [GPLv2,GPLv3] to [GPLv2]. I don't think we need approval from the original authors from that. The original authors already stated: "my code can be either under GPLv2 or GPLv3". Now we are only offering it under GPLv2. Users can still get the older version from a past Xen release under GPLv3 if they want to. So I think we can drop "or later" any time as long as the maintainers agree. George, do you agree with the above?
