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

[John Ralls]

On Aug 6, 2013, at 1:14 PM, Christian Stimming <christian at cstimming.de> wrote:

> 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.

IANAL and all that, but I'm pretty sure that if a dependency were to become 
GPL3 only we would have to switch to the same or freeze versions of that
dependency at the last GPL2 version. What our current license does is allow
someone dependent upon Gnucash's API to license their derivative work 
as GPL2 or GPL3. Josh's more restrictive GPL2 or GPL3 means that derivative
works wouldn't be able to use his code with GPL4 should such a thing ever
happen.

Apple won't admit it, but it's widely believed that they froze the versions of all of
the FSF code that they distribute with OSX because they can't swallow GPL3.
The good thing is that it also motivated them to start the llvm project, which has
given gcc some much-needed competition. ;-)

Grepping through my sources directory, I find no dependencies requiring GPL3,
only a few programs. At the moment, we're OK.

>> 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.

Right. I'll yank the paragraph.

Regards,
John Ralls