Licensing guidelines changes

Jakub Jelinek jakub at redhat.com
Thu Aug 2 18:42:15 UTC 2007


On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 01:56:46PM -0400, Tom spot Callaway wrote:
>     This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
>     it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
>     the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
>     (at your option) any later version.
> 
> The GPL/LGPL "or any later version" clause is _only_ activated when
> upstream puts it in the source code or attached documentation, so if you
> can't find it outside of COPYING, it doesn't apply.
> 
> If you do find it, you make sure the License identifier ends with a +.

Shouldn't this be if you find the "or any later version" in all files
with GPL (resp. LGPL) header?
Even one file with GPL header without the "any later version" should be
enough to make the whole non-distributable under any later version.
Or are we supposed to put multiple licenses in the tag in that case?
Say for glibc in F7:
License: LGPL2.1+, LGPL2.1/exception, GPL2+, GPL2
(the library stuff is under LGPL2.1 or any later version, except
some files have an exception, so that you can link them even into
proprietary stuff (e.g. crt files, lib*_nonshared.a), then there
are some GPL2 or any later version executables and by mistake
some executables were GPL2only (corrected in 2.6.90)).

	Jakub




More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list