Re: [Qemu-devel] GPLv3 troubles

[Blue Swirl]

On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 5:46 PM, Stefan Weil <address@hidden> wrote:
> Am 17.10.2011 18:47, schrieb Anthony Liguori:
>>
>> On 10/17/2011 11:30 AM, Andreas Färber wrote:
>>>
>>> Am 17.10.2011 16:17, schrieb Anthony Liguori:
>>>>
>>>> On 10/17/2011 07:50 AM, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> On 10/17/2011 02:38 PM, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Could we please draft some policy on this? This is not a GDB issue,
>>>>>>> it's
>>>>>>> very general. Whether we like it or not, there is GPLv3-licensed code
>>>>>>> and there will probably be a GPLv4 one day.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I don't see anything wrong with GPLv2 only. While I don't think
>>>>>> there's
>>>>>> anything wrong with GPLv3, I think that "or later" is a dangerous
>>>>>> clause
>>>>>> to add.
>>>>>
>>>>> License fragmentation with respect to the de facto standard toolchain
>>>>> (binutils)
>>>>> is wrong.
>>>>
>>>> Fragmentation with respect to the de factor standard kernel (Linux) is
>>>> wrong.
>>>
>>> Tell that to the GNU and FSF people. :)
>>>
>>> In my personal opinion, Open Source licenses should preserve our
>>> freedom, not make us unnecessarily duplicate code.
>>>
>>> I'm just asking to not make the situation worse than it is.
>>
>> It's not something that any one person can really change.  It would
>> require a very large effort.  To give you an idea of the scope, I ran the
>> following command:
>>
>> $ grep GPL *.c  hw/*.c | grep -v 'or later' | cut -f1 -d: | sort -u |
>> while read i; do echo $i; git log --format="  %an <%ae>" $i | sort -u; done
>>
>> Here's the results.  All of these people would have to explicitly SoB a
>> relicense of that specific file to include a "v2 or later" clause.  In some
>> cases, there's code from Thiemo which cannot be relicensed due to his
>> untimely passing.
>
>
> So let's start. For any of my contributions, I agree to GPL v2 or later.
> Later generations should have the possibility to replace GPL v2 by
> something which matches future requirements.

Me too, I'd also accept any other GPL v2 or v3 compatible licenses.

> I'd appreciate if no new files were published with GPL v2 only.

This could be more difficult.

> Stefan W.
>
> PS. I no longer use my old email address because Berlios
> will be closed on 2011-12-31, see http://www.berlios.de/.
>
>