[Sugar-devel] [IAEP] ANNOUNCE: Moving Sugar to GPLv3+

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 6:18 PM, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> Q: Do we need to ask the permission of all copyright holders?
> A: No, we'll take advantage of the "or any later version" clause in the
> current license. We're not retroactively re-licensing existing code.

This isn't actually true.  You can't change the license on my code --
it's still "GPLv2 or later".  You can make a combined work where the
new parts are GPLv3, and you can redistribute it under the terms of
the GPLv3 (because of the "or later"), but you cannot change the
license on the existing code unless you are the sole owner.  That is
why the FSF does copyright assignment.

(See discussions on the net, for example: http://lwn.net/Articles/228354/ )

I'm also opposed to this change, for three reasons:
a) code of the affected code is mine, and i don't want to do it.
b) it seems to have no point, other than a philosophic one.  I'm
opposed to change-for-change sake in this matter; it can only make
things worse, and I see nothing which is being made *better*.
(Ironically, moving to GPLv3 is taking freedoms *away* from users of
Sugar).

 --scott
-- 
      ( http://cscott.net )