Please tone down the GPL3 paranoia

[Rich Felker]

On Fri, Sep 15, 2006 at 09:07:48AM -0700, Bruce Perens wrote:
> Rob Landley wrote:
> > The old code can still be used under the terms of the GPLv2. 
> Yes, you may still use my old contributions under the GPL2 or indeed any
> GPL license whatsoever. But I want to be extremely clear about this. I
> do not wish you to redesignate my old contributions to be licensable
> under GPL2 only, and am quite sure that you would be violating my rights
> to do so, even if you differ.

No, he is not. You licensed the code under GPL v2 or later, at the
licensee's option. Rob et al. have chosen to use it under GPL v2 and
to license the derived work under GPL v2 only. The "or later"
condition is NOT viral.

> Thus, I request and require that you add a notice to the license
> statement for busybox that portions of the program are copyrighted by
> me, and may be licensed under the GNU General Public License without
> regard to the particular version of that license.

This is not the original code but a derived work. Licensing under "v2
or later" is not possible unless all the other copyright holders agree
to "or later". If any of them disagree then the derived work is "v2
only". Rob is one of the copyright holders to the derived work and he
apparently does not accept "or later".

> You must preserve that
> notice in all further releases.

Additional restrictions like this are incompatible with the GPL. :)

Rich


P.S. RE: the subject line change, one could equally say to you,
"please tone down the anti-GPLv2 paranoia"...