Re: [Qemu-devel] GPLv3 troubles

[Stefan Weil]

Am 17.10.2011 18:47, schrieb Anthony Liguori:
> On 10/17/2011 11:30 AM, Andreas Färber wrote:
> > Am 17.10.2011 16:17, schrieb Anthony Liguori:
> > > On 10/17/2011 07:50 AM, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> > > > On 10/17/2011 02:38 PM, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> > > > > > Could we please draft some policy on this? This is not a GDB issue,
> > > > > > it's
> > > > > > very general. Whether we like it or not, there is GPLv3-licensed 
> > > > > > code
> > > > > > and there will probably be a GPLv4 one day.
> > > > >
> > > > > I don't see anything wrong with GPLv2 only. While I don't think 
> > > > > there's
> > > > > anything wrong with GPLv3, I think that "or later" is a dangerous 
> > > > > clause
> > > > > to add.
> > > >
> > > > License fragmentation with respect to the de facto standard toolchain
> > > > (binutils)
> > > > is wrong.
> > >
> > > Fragmentation with respect to the de factor standard kernel (Linux) is
> > > wrong.
> >
> > Tell that to the GNU and FSF people. :)
> >
> > In my personal opinion, Open Source licenses should preserve our
> > freedom, not make us unnecessarily duplicate code.
> >
> > I'm just asking to not make the situation worse than it is.
>
> It's not something that any one person can really change.  It would 
> require a very large effort.  To give you an idea of the scope, I ran 
> the following command:
>
> $ grep GPL *.c  hw/*.c | grep -v 'or later' | cut -f1 -d: | sort -u | 
> while read i; do echo $i; git log --format="  %an <%ae>" $i | sort -u; 
> done
>
> Here's the results.  All of these people would have to explicitly SoB 
> a relicense of that specific file to include a "v2 or later" clause.  
> In some cases, there's code from Thiemo which cannot be relicensed due 
> to his untimely passing.


So let's start. For any of my contributions, I agree to GPL v2 or later.
Later generations should have the possibility to replace GPL v2 by
something which matches future requirements.

I'd appreciate if no new files were published with GPL v2 only.

Stefan W.

PS. I no longer use my old email address because Berlios
will be closed on 2011-12-31, see http://www.berlios.de/.