Re: NEW ocaml licence proposal by upstream, will be part of the 3.08.1 release going into sarge.

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Thu, Aug 26, 2004 at 10:41:50AM -0400, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
> > Interesting point. Still it would cause problem to upstream to integrate your
> > patch, because he cannot easily merge a GPL 2 only patch into a GPL 2 or later
> > original work, since it would obviously force him to drop the "or later" part
> > of the original work in the merged work.
> 
> Well, sort of.  *His* part is still available under as liberal a
> license as he likes.  *My* part is under exactly the license I like.

No, the combined work is under GPL 2 only. There is no *part* thingy. Once you
build binaries with all of it, then you build binaries, and you have to
consider the derived work as a whole.

> If he had offered his under "GPL or BSD, your choice!" and I submitted
> changes, he would only be able to use those under the GPL.  "GPL v2 or
> v3, your choice!" is no different.  GPL 9 is there so that I *can*
> release mine under "GPL v2 or later" and he can then integrate it into
> his, because there's explicit definition of what this means and how it
> works with the rest of the GPL.

Ok.

> It's certainly very different, now that we've looked at it closely,
> from the QPL 3b insistence that modifiers provide more permissive
> licenses to the initial developer -- the GPL doesn't require any
> license to the initial developer unless he's offered a copy, and then
> only requires its own exact terms.

Well, but if the original program is of the GPL v2 or later kind, and you
release it as GPL v2, then your patch is unusable to upstream, and in
particular cannot be relicenced under the GPL v3.

Friendly,

Sven Luther