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

[Christian Stimming]

Hi John,

Am Montag, 5. August 2013, 21:31:09 schrieb John Ralls:
> > 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].

>From my memory: Josh had some source files licensed as "version 2" [only], and 
maybe he even sent an announcement about his switch to "version 2 only" to the 
list somewhere in 2005/2006. All other source files with license comments were 
using "or (at your option) any later version". The combination meant that the 
complete gnucash source code is "version 2 only". In 2010 and triggered by the 
FSF email you mentioned I thought this might cause a problem once one of our 
upstream library switched to "GPL version 3 only", in which case gnucash 
wouldn't be allowed to use those upstream libraries anymore. The solution was 
that Josh agreed to extend his licensing to "version 2 or version 3". This was 
the change in 2010. There was no other significant change before or after, 
IIRC.

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

Oh well, maybe not untrue, but on the other hand, not directly relevant with 
this version series.

Regards,

Christian

> 
> 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