Re: Plan to release a gplv3 compliant debian-based release
David Weinehall wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 05, 2013 at 04:14:57PM +0300, Uoti Urpala wrote:
> [snip]
> > a post from Alan Cox explaining this. I don't see why you would post
> > your link again in full quote after that without explaining why you
> > still thought Linus wasn't wrong.
>
> I posted it fully because the parent I responded to said that we
> shouldn't just post links, thus I interpreted it as though the full
> text of that link was prefered.
I meant reposting it after the posting of another link which clearly
questioned its correctness, without any comment on why you still thought
it valid.
> As for my opinions:
>
> While Alan's opinions are certainly relevant for the large amounts of
> code *he* has participated, I think anyone would be hard pressed to
The reason I replied wasn't so much to comment on the historical
licensing of the kernel (it's old enough to not matter much now anyway),
but to comment on the legal argument that was the core of Linus's post
you linked to. He claimed that including the contents of GPL-2 in a
"COPYING" file with no explicit license statements had always placed the
code under GPL v2-only. I think he's wrong. And this actually matters
for other projects. Linux is not the only project that had no explicit
license statements at some point in its history, and such an
interpretation would prevent adding per-file copyright statements with
"or later" without full contact-all-contributors relicensing - and most
projects do NOT want to be trapped at one particular version.
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