GPL licenses and the "any later version" phrase (was: Re: A possible GFDL compromise)
On Sat, Aug 30, 2003 at 12:15:50AM +0200, Mathieu Roy wrote:
> Without him, things are more unsettled. To be honest, I have no strict
> guarantees that the FSF cannot change but I hope that if someday the
> FSF disregard the GNU project and the Free Software definition
> promoted by RMS, people will change their distribution policy
> (software distributed under the GPL v2 and later version until the GPL
> vCorrupted) and will claim the GPL vCorrupted not to be a valid GPL in
> the spirit of the previous versions, not applicable to their software.
If you've already specifically allowed your software to be released
under it, i.e., by stating that the user may elect to redistribute
under the terms of "any later version", how can you retroactively remove
that permission? Once software is licensed with that clause, it's
already too late. When the unthinkable happens and the FSF publishes
GPLvX, which treats software under it as if in the public domain, any
software already released with the "any later version" phrase can be
used under the new terms. You can't do anything about it.
> If this hypothetical new GPL vCorrupted is more restrictive than the
> GPL v2, there's no reason to care about. A contrario, if this
> hypothetical new license is less restrictive, forgetting to protect
> authors as the GPL those authors picked, I think they should be able
> to sue people that would be trying to use/distribute the software
> under the terms of this corrupted new license.
How could they do that? They explicitly allowed users to distribute that
software under "any later version". They'd be suing for doing what they
explicitly allowed in the license.
That's the whole point of the "any later version" phrase- to add new
allowable terms under which your work may be used/redistributed/etc.
> I'm not a lawyer, it would be interesting to get an answer about it
> from licensing@gnu.org.
..Although it's rather in their interests to encourage further use of the
phrase.
> > > The advantages of the "or any later version" is bigger than the
> > > possibility of such a GPLv4, IMHO.
> >
> > What are those advantages?
>
> If you write a GPL v2 only software, you'll have to edit every headers
> of your software's files once the GPL v3 will be published.
/Only/ if I choose to re-license that software under a different license
(GPLv3). As it now seems that the GPLv3 will in fact be less free, I
will probably not /want/ to do so.
> Worse, if you stop maintaining your software or if you die, your code
> may become incompatible with the latest GPL version, people will not
> be able to distribute a software with some part of your work under the
> GPL v3 only.
The copyright to a work does not simply disappear into nowhere when the
holder dies, any more than his other possessions.
> And, if we forget the horrid scenario at the beginning of this
> message, there's no problem with it.
So you would suggest that I simply rely on the goodwill of other people
and other organizations to ensure that things stay free? Considering the
battles raging even today to take away or undermine free software, I
don't consider that a wise plan.
--
.------------------------------------------------------------.
| paul cannon pik@debian.org |
| http://people.debian.org/~pik/ |
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