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

[Peter Robinson]

On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 1:00 AM, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-04-21 at 18:47 -0400, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Isn't this exactly what I wrote?
>
>  We're not retroactively re-licensing existing code.

Really? By moving to GPLv3 your removing the ability to use GPLv2
which is by definition a re-license of the code.

Peter