Re: Overview of copyright issues

[Reinhold Kainhofer]

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Am Donnerstag, 10. September 2009 09:30:57 schrieb Hans Aberg:
> > I'm not a lawyer, but if I came across "v2 or latest" wording, my
> > advice would be to treat it as "v2 only" because to do anything else
> > IS TOO DANGEROUS. So your wording is self-defeating because no sane
> > distributor would dare take advantage of the "or latest" clause.
>
> That seems to be the case: at least for new restrictions, "or later"
> essentially useless.

No, it's rather essential. Imagine someone wants to create a fork of LilyPond, 
where he directly links to gs instead of calling the binary. He'll be out of 
luck, because gs is GPL v3(+?), while LilyPond is GPL v2only. The "or later" 
allows to link GPL v3 libraries...


> So it is probably simplest to just update the license when you have
> time. All these GPLs are probably reasonable for LilyPond

You can't simply go around and change licenses, unless you are the copyright 
holder! That's the paperwork that is needed: Every contributor, who has until 
now contributes as GPL v2only, needs to agree to change his/her contributions 
to GPL v2+. Unless you track down every substantial contributor (git helps in 
that regard), LilyPond can't switch to GPL v2+.

Cheers,
Reinhold

- -- 
- ------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhold Kainhofer, address@hidden, http://reinhold.kainhofer.com/
 * Financial & Actuarial Math., Vienna Univ. of Technology, Austria
 * http://www.fam.tuwien.ac.at/, DVR: 0005886
 * LilyPond, Music typesetting, http://www.lilypond.org
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