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Re: Adding licencing terms to GPL-2



On Tue, Sep 24, 2019 at 05:48:25PM +0200, Sebastian Humenda wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I would like to request your help on a licencing issue that we are having in
> FreeDict. Since I am the maintainer of the freedict dictionaries in Debian, this
> would affect Debian in the longer term too, hence I thought you might be willing
> to help.
> 
> A contributor changed the licencing terms of a dictionary like this:
> 
>     -               <p>Available under the terms of the <ref target="https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html";>GNU General Public License ver. 3.0 and any later version</ref>.</p>
>     +               <p>Available under the terms of the <ref target="https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html";>GNU General Public License ver. 3.0 and any later version</ref> and all changes after version 0.3 (0.3 included) is also released under Text of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and any later version (dual license).</p>
> 
> According to him, the dual-licencing is fine because the mentioned licence is
> compatible  with the GPL. Changes to a file must obey the licencing terms and

IANAL, TINLA.

It's one-way compatible, meaning the opposite (dual-licensing a work
under CC-BY-SA 4.0) would be fine. Maybe you could send this link and
try to clarify things with the contributor? In any case, Debian could
still distribute it under GPLv3.0 only.

https://creativecommons.org/2015/10/08/cc-by-sa-4-0-now-one-way-compatible-with-gplv3/

> GPL does AFAIK not allow relicencing. The only acception would be if all authors
> agree so that the work can indeed be relicenced.
> 
> What do you think is the correct way to move forward?
> 
> Thanks
> Sebastian


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