[Savannah-hackers] Re: submission of SQUALK modular IRC services - savannah.nongnu.org

[Mathieu Roy]

Matt Kavanagh <address@hidden> said:

> On Sun, Oct 26, 2003 at 09:21:41AM -0500, Rudy Gevaert wrote:
>> Licensing under the "GNU GPL v2 only" is problematic.
>> Would you please agree to license under the "GNU GPL v2 or later"?
>> 
>> The reason for this is that when we publish GPL v3, it will be
>> important for all GPL-covered programs to advance to GPL v3.  If you
>> don't put this in the files now, the only way to port your program to
>> GPL v3 would be to ask each and every copyright holder, and that may
>> be very difficult.
>> 
>> We can explain the issue in more detail if you wish.  If you have
>> concerns about "GNU GPL v2 or later", We'd be happy to address them
>> too.
>
> As I'm the only developer currently and all code I have looked at in relation
> to this can be licensed under any version of the GNU GPL, the issue of
> obtaining permission from copyright holders doesn't really apply at the moment
> as far as I can see.

The issue would apply to someone else looking at your code. 

> I'm not willing to release code I write under an as yet unpublished
>license, sorry.

While I partially agree with your concern, in the current state of
thing it seems harmless to pick the GPLv2 and later version: if you
find later reasons to stop trusting the FSF, it will be easy for you
to relicense your software under the GPLv2 only.

This risk seems in a near future pretty small, while the nuisance can
be way bigger.

For that reason, we will problably not accept to host a project under
the GPLv2 only.

Regards,

-- 
Mathieu Roy

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