On Thu, Dec 13, 2007 at 03:06:27PM +0100, Holger Levsen wrote: > And yes, if you refer to "the GPL" today, it certainly means GPL3. Not at all. Well, at least not completely. ;-) GNU GPL 3 itself says about this (section 14): If the Program does not specify a version number of the GNU General Public License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation. (Version 2 says this as well, by the way, in section 9.) > > Are now all packages buggy that reference > > /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL instead of GPL-2 because GPL now > > points to GPL-3? > > Yes. Only if they are "GPL 2 only". GPL 3 is a valid license for a GPL2+ licensed work. It might be better to reference both version 2 and 3, but referencing version 3 is certainly not wrong. > > the GPL symlink should be removed alltogether to avoid similar > > issues when the next GPL version comes along. > > Yes. Or we could define what it should be used for. :-) I think it is reasonable to use it to refer to the latest version of the license for GPL*+ licensed programs. As in: This program is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or any later version. Version 2 can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2 ; The latest version of the license can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL . Or something like that. IANAL, TINLA. Thanks, Bas -- I encourage people to send encrypted e-mail (see http://www.gnupg.org). If you have problems reading my e-mail, use a better reader. Please send the central message of e-mails as plain text in the message body, not as HTML and definitely not as MS Word. Please do not use the MS Word format for attachments either. For more information, see http://pcbcn10.phys.rug.nl/e-mail.html
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