Re: gpl3 vs. gpl3+

[Alex Kost]

Mark H Weaver (2015-07-26 18:54 +0300) wrote:

> Alex Kost <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> I see that only several packages uses 'gpl3' license.  And I don't
>> really understand the cases when it should be used instead of 'gpl3+'.
>>
>> I looked at "aarddict" and "weechat".  They have the same
>> COPYING/LICENSE files as <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt>.  So it
>> should be gpl3+, right?
>
> The license of a program is determined by the copyright notices in the
> files themselves, not by the mere existence of a copy of a license
> somewhere in the tarball.
>
> Language like this in the files means gpl3+:
>
> ;;; GNU Guix 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 3 of the License, or (at
> ;;; your option) any later version.
>
> If the "or (at your option) any later version" language is missing, then
> it's just gpl3.
>
> To ease the labor of looking at the copyright notices on every file, I
> look at the corresponding Debian copyright file.  Debian tends to do a
> fairly thorough job of license checking.  I search for the package using
> http://packages.debian.org/<PACKAGE-NAME>, I select a package whose
> version number is the same (or quite close) to the one I'm packaging,
> and then I select the "Copyright File" link in the "Debian Resources"
> section on the right side of the web page.
>
> Also beware that the Debian copyright file only documents licenses on
> files that they have not removed.  Just below the "Debian Resources"
> section on the right is a section "Download Source Package".  If you see
> "DFSG" in the name of the original tarball file, that means that they've
> removed files for copyright reasons.
>
> Hope this helps,

Yes, thank you for the explanation and the "Debian copyright file" hint.

So I think, that the license of "weechat" should be changed to 'gpl3+'.
I quickly looked at the source files and at
<http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/w/weechat/weechat_1.0.1-1_copyright>
and there is "any later version" everywhere.

I didn't look at other 'gpl3' packages, but I belive "weechat" is not the
only package with a mistake in license field.  (I should probably just
walk through all these packages and fix licenses all at once)

Also what to do with "flexbar"?  It has neither COPYING/LICENSE file,
nor copyright notices in the source files.  As I mentioned earlier only
"src/Flexbar.cpp" file has "(GPLv3)" in its commentary and nothing more.

-- 
Alex