This weekend's witch-hunt

[Rich Felker]

On Tue, Sep 19, 2006 at 11:17:54PM -0700, Bruce Perens wrote:
> > The last sentence is relevant here.  I may choose the version.
> Yes, for the overall work. But you seem to believe that you have the
> right to remove someone else's right to choose a different GPL version
> to use with a particular fragment of code, where the copyright holder
> has made the right to use that version available.

Bruce, what you fail to realize is that the original work which you
licensed under GPL "v2 or later" IS NOT THERE. All that's there is
derivative works which contain code by other authors as well. No one
is "removing" permissions from your original work; anyone wanting to
get it under GPL v2 or later can go dig it out of Busybox 0.1 or
whatever your last release was. But what's in svn now cannot be used
under GPL v3 and thus there's no way to "dual license" whatever small
amount of code you have since it's inseparably tied into countless
other people's contributions.

Rich