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From: | Paolo Bonzini |
Subject: | Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] Mark future contributions to GPLv2-only files as GPLv2+ |
Date: | Fri, 21 Oct 2011 16:27:04 +0200 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:7.0) Gecko/20110927 Thunderbird/7.0 |
On 10/21/2011 04:11 PM, Anthony Liguori wrote:
Otherwise I'm a bit concerned about ambiguity here. Let's say we have to backport a fit to stable, we need to pull in this new copyright statement. But then what if we later discovered we need to pull in a fix from before 10/25. That will appear in the stable tree as a post-10/25 commit but it carries a GPLv2 only license.
You will never need to include this patch on 0.15 and earlier stable branches.
It is legal to take GPLv2+ contributions and restrict them to GPLv2-only. Backporting is distributing, and a distributor can choose under which license he does so. So there should be no problem with stable backports, whoever does the backports is implicitly restricting the licensing to GPLv2-only.
In fact, the text is just there to inform new contributors of the license. Perhaps just changing the wording satisfies you, like "By signing off changes to this files after 10/25 you agree that the file may be relicensed under GPLv2+ in the future"?
I think a per-file flag day is really the only sane approach to this.
We need to make it clear right now that, from now on, GPLv3-incompatible changes will not be accepted.
Paolo
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