Hi Giacomo! Thank you for your reply, and sorry for the delay in my own. On Sat, Feb 02, 2019 at 10:54:32AM +0000, Giacomo wrote: > I'm one of the old contributors: years ago I did the port from PHP4 to PHP5. > Wow, thank you for that work upstream :-) > To be honest I can't recall if my contribution was done under GPLv2 or GPLv3 (or if it included the "or later" option), but I guess it was GPLv2+ as GPLv3 was yet to come. > > In any case why restrict the license to GPLv3+ that is incompatible with GPLv2 while the current license is compatible with both GPLv3 and GPLv2? > > > Is there any strategic advantage for users' freedom I miss? > > If not, I think that the php-mode would benefit to stay GPLv2+. > I agree, and also prefer GPLv2+ for similar reasons. I don't remember when it happened off the top of my head, but FYI upstream changed maintainers and relicensed to GPLv3+. https://github.com/emacs-php/php-mode/issues/387 https://github.com/ejmr/php-mode Getting confirmation of copyright for debian/changelog for contributors who are long gone is an annoying issue when moving to copyright-format 1.0... In this case, luckily, Ola is still around to answer the question of what debian/* packaging was originally intended to be licensed as! :-) It would be nice if there was an official statement from debian-legal, codified somewhere, saying that 1) for a package that does not use machine-readable copyright-format 1.0 2) when the original packager is able to confirm the license of debian/*, 3) then all subsequent contributions to debian/changelog fall under that license. I doubt I'm the only contributor who was mentored to be strict about these things, and then ended up taking up a bunch of people's time for paperwork... Cheers, Nicholas
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