[GRASS5] license question

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 05:03:01PM +0200, Radim Blazek wrote:
> On Sunday 21 March 2004 09:29, Hamish wrote:
> > grass/src/general/init/license.txt
> > and
> > grass51/lib/init/license.txt
> >
> > state:
> > "Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS) is Copyright,
> > 1999-2004 by the GRASS Development Team, and licensed under terms of the
> > GNU General Public License (GPL)."
> >
> > Should that specifically say GPL version 2?

Probably verson 2 or later as recommended.

> > The COPYING files do; 
> 
> I dont know if it is important in license.txt, but I have changed it
> in grass51 to "GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2."
> 
> COPYING says "either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version"
> and many source files "GNU General Public License (>=v2)"
> (recommended in grass/SUBMITTING).
> 
> I think that to use a license which nobody knows is nonsense.

Your statement is not well thought through.

This option for a later license is necessary to be able to fix legal holes.
Note that the new license can only be in the spirit of the 
reamble of the old one, so you know what the new license will say
in general, though some legalise might change.
In addition everybody can continue to use the software under the old license.

Some other information on this:
http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#VersionTwoOrLater

It is about the legal maintainability of a Software.
You are making the same mistake as the linux people:
They were not watching their legal status and got that SCO case 
as one of the results of this.

> If the next version will be compatible, people can 
> change the license in future - no need to give permission now.

Practical reason make that harder than necessary.

> I don't think that we want to give now permission to relicense 
> GRASS, using a license non compatible with current license.

True, though this clause does not give that.

Thanks for added GPL.TXT, is was obviously missing.
	Bernhard
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