GPL licensing
2008 April 9
I use a GPLv2-only licensing in some parts of my RSS Reader application. Now I just recently got a note from Debian’s Hubert Chathi via E-Mail that this license is – fasten your seatbelts – incompatible with LGPLv3. In short: When shifting from GPLv2 to GPLv3, the FSF managed to change the *GPL licenses in such a way that GPLv2-only applications automatically become incompatible and thus illegal-to-link with whatever LGPL3-framework they’re using. Words fail me when trying to comprehend these licensing politics.
This will make me think twice about whether GPL is a good choice for future publishing of source code.
Update (June 9th 2008): For the release of the next stable GNUstep release, the project temporarily reverted its license back to GPLv2+. Link, Link. Here’s the original discussion about the GPLv2 licensing issues on the GNUstep developers’ mailing list. (This linked message also contains a list of the GPLv2-only-licensed projects causing these problems. Regarding the low overall number of GNUstep applications, this number is quite impressive.)
That’s why most GPLv2 disclaimers state:
“[...] under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.”
While this doesn’t protect you from any new “bogus” GPL-versions, it at least insures compatibility with later GPL versions such as GPLv3.
Well, this is rather a good move from the fsf peole, not very different from what’s used with software versioning. Ideally you want to have everybody using the latest stable version of everything. The GPLv3 is not bad at all: http://blog.milkingthegnu.org/2008/04/gnu-gpl-for-dum.html) when you think about it