Bug#436105: suggestion to add GPL-1 as a common licence
Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es> writes:
> Then we usually add this little blurb:
> On Debian GNU/Linux systems, the complete text of the GNU General
> Public License can be found in `/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL'.
> which is an addon to the previous paragraph, so it's for informational
> purposes as well.
> Thus, I see no reason to use a versioned license when the license says
> "version foo or later". If we say "GPL is here" and there is a policy
> that GPL is a symlink that always point to the latest version, then
> the paragraph saying "GPL is here" is equivalent to "The latest
> version of GPL is here". That's a fact. No relicensing anywhere.
This doesn't really matter a tremendous amount, but I wanted to explain my
reasoning on this part for why I bring this up. The issue is the
following clause of the GPL:
1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's
source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you
conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate
copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the
notices that refer to this General Public License and to the absence
of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy
of this General Public License along with the Program.
particularly the last clause. We do not give the recipients of the
package a copy of the GPL version 1 along with the Program, so it is
therefore illegal for us to distribute the Program under the terms of the
GPL version 1. So either we're breaking the license, or we're implicitly
distributing the package under the terms of the GPL version that we *do*
include with the package (either version 2 or version 3), taking advantage
of the permission we're granted to relicense under a later version. I
generally assume that we're doing the latter, since breaking the license
sounds bad. :)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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