On Fri, 29 May 2015 14:50:39 +0200 Ole Streicher wrote: > Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@debian.org> writes: [...] > > Only the copyright holder can change what a *work* is licensed as. Unless the copyright holder grants the permission to do so, I would say... [...] > > If the original license allows, then anyone can redistribute the files > under a different license. And (L)GPL has a paragraph that allows this > under certain conditions (namely LGPL -> GPL, and version upgrades). The GNU LGPL v2 (which I understand is the original license for the original files, before they were modified and released under the terms of the GNU GPL v3 or later) states, in section 3: | 3. You may opt to apply the terms of the ordinary GNU General Public | License instead of this License to a given copy of the Library. To do | this, you must alter all the notices that refer to this License, so | that they refer to the ordinary GNU General Public License, version 2, | instead of to this License. (If a newer version than version 2 of the | ordinary GNU General Public License has appeared, then you can specify | that version instead if you wish.) Do not make any other change in | these notices. | | Once this change is made in a given copy, it is irreversible for | that copy, so the ordinary GNU General Public License applies to all | subsequent copies and derivative works made from that copy. | | This option is useful when you wish to copy part of the code of | the Library into a program that is not a library. So it seems to me that it is indeed possible to redistribute those files under the terms of the GNU GPL v3 or later, by altering the permission notices so that they refer to the GPL-3+. And this operation is irreversible. Hence, I cannot understand why the FTP masters asked you to add "GPL-2+ for these files to debian/copyright", when "GPL-2+" seems to have never described the licensing status for those files, before or after their adaptation into the "missfits" package... I hope this helps to shed some light on this garbled issue. Bye. -- http://www.inventati.org/frx/ There's not a second to spare! To the laboratory! ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == CA01 1147 9CD2 EFDF FB82 3925 3E1C 27E1 1F69 BFFE
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