Cease Fire, please Glenn L McGrath bug1 at ihug.co.nz Thu Sep 21 05:51:49 UTC 2006 The license of this project should serve the best interests of the project, i fear the future of this project is being jeopardised by people trying to push their own agenda's. I am not convinced that the "or later" clause that has been assigned to original works is revocable, and im sure there are other people who are uncertain of legal issues surrounding the licensing issues that we are facing. GPLv2 clause 9 states "If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation." I dont see where it implies the right of licensees to remove the "or later" statement. For all i know removing the "or later" clause may be adding a further restriction to the license which isnt allowed according to clause 6. IANAL, and neither are any of you, so lets not try and prove who is best amateur. Can we please get an independent expert legal opinion (i.e. SFLC) on what is required to move from "GPLv2 or later" to "GPLv2 only" before we go any further. When the GPLv3 is released many other projects will face a similar situation to the one we are now facing, and i believe it is prudent for us to make sure we do it right. Glenn
Cease Fire, please Rob Landley rob at landley.net Thu Sep 21 19:31:18 UTC 2006 On Thursday 21 September 2006 1:51 am, Glenn L McGrath wrote: > The license of this project should serve the best interests of the > project, i fear the future of this project is being jeopardised by > people trying to push their own agenda's. Well, I'm still working on the project. The lawyers at the SFLC have reviewed the new LICENSE file and http://busybox.net/license.html, and I confirmed that Erik's fine with it. Life is good. I'm back to coding. I'd reply the rest of your message, but it's yet another "but wait, I don't understand the law!" type message that I'm really really tired of slogging through. You already cc'd me on the email you sent to the SFLC, and they're far more qualified to answer your questions than I am. I'm going to forward the rest of this sort of thing to them, and get on with coding. I should have a busybox-1.2.1.fixes.patch ready in the next few days. I'll poke the list when it's ready for review, and then 1.2.2 should come out a day or two later. That's the last "GPLv2 or later" release I'm doing, with all the changes up to svn 16112 that need backporting to -stable. If anyone wants to fork from that, they're welcome to do so. Not my problem... Rob -- Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.
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