ANNOUNCE: Announcement: GnuCash 2.5.4 (Unstable) Release 2013-08-05

[John Ralls]

On Aug 5, 2013, at 1:20 PM, Christian Stimming <christian at cstimming.de> wrote:

> Hi John,
> 
> thanks for preparing the next release. There is progress! Yes there is.
> 
> Am Montag, 5. August 2013, 07:39:28 schrieb John Ralls:
>> GnuCash 2.5.4 (Unstable) released
>> ...
> 
> One minor nitpick:
> 
>> • By agreement of all authors we have
>> relicensed Gnucash to the Gnu Public License Version 2 or later from just
>> Version 2.
> 
> The relicensing resulted in "GPL Version 2 and/or Version 3" instead of a mix 
> of "GPL Version 2 or later" or "GPL Version 2 only".

Hmm.

LICENSE says 
"The software, for most intents and purposes, is licensed under the GNU
General Public License, Version 2, or (at your option) Version 3.

"Almost all of the source files are licensed under the GNU GPL, Version
2, "or (at your option) any later version".  Some of the source files
are licensed under "Version 2 and/or Version 3" of the GNU GPL
specifically."

The "some source files" in this case seem to be Josh Sled's; there are only 22 of them,
versus 1043 licensed to "or any later version". There are 81 files with neither, 
most of which have no license statement at all.

I thought I remembered that we'd gotten permission from a bunch of the older devs who had
contributed code to agree to the "or (at your option) any later version", but I can't find that
set of messages -- but I did find messages from 2007 (before I joined the project) talking about
adding the "or later" language, and I found Josh's [1] permission to adopt "GPL Version 2 and/or
Version 3" *for his files*, and a short thread originating with FSF [2].

So I think that I should just remove the statement entirely from the announcements. It appears
to be untrue.

Regards,
John Ralls

[1] https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2010-August/029370.html
[2] https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2010-January/027208.html