Re: GPL V2 and GPLv3
Peter S Galbraith <psg@debian.org> writes:
> This isn't strictly an Emacs isuue, but it certainly affects us...
>
> As I understand it, the GPL v3 is more strict then the GPL v2 and thus
> is incompatible. Is that correct?
It seems so, see
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#v2v3Compatibility.
> That means that as Emacs migrates to GPL v3, and elisp code licensed
> under the GPL v2 (without the "or any later version" bit) will be
> incompatible.
Unfortunately, yes.
> So if we have any such elisp code in Debian, should we exclude
> installation and byte-compilation for versions of Emacs that are
> licensed under the GPL v3? I presume this includes emacs-snapshot and
> likely any future bug fix release of Emacs 22.
Emacs 22.2 will be released under GPL v3. As for emacs-snapshot, the
first version after upstream's switch to GPL 3 seems to be 1:20070805-1.
> Have I missed something?
I think the upstream authors should be contacted to relicense their
code. Especially authors of old code (when v2 was the only GPL
version) might not have been aware of the incompatibility and just
chose sloppy wording that needs to be clarified now.
Regards,
Sven
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