Bas Wijnen wrote:
RMS does this, in his attempts to move people to use the newest version of the GPL. He has a point, but if Debian would fully agree with it, I suppose we would relicense all GPL works as GPL version 3 or later whenpossible.
I am not a lawyer (and you'll need a lawyer knowing the laws in many countries) but I am not sure that Debian or "you" (who ever that mean) can change the licence from GPLv2 to GPLv3 without the explicit consent of the copyright owner (which is usually not "Debian", and perhaps not the FSF, except for core GNU packages like GCC etc...)
I understand that the GPLv2 or later is applicable to the user, who can use the software under GPLv3 (for example).
But I am really not a lawyer.In short, I am not at all sure that Debian could legally change all GPLv2+ licensed software to GPLv3. Perhaps you need to be the copyright owner to do that.
IANAL
Regards.
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Basile STARYNKEVITCH http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
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