Should we drop the "or later" after GPLv2?

[Rob Landley]

On Thursday 24 August 2006 2:39 pm, Jason Schoon wrote:
> On 8/24/06, Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
>  <discussion snipped for my take on things once again>
> 
> Thinking it over some more, and reading more of the comments on these
> threads, I think it boils down to 2 possible choices.  There is the third
> choice of "do nothing", but lets assume we are already past that point.

We're not past that point yet, but we've experienced our first real downsides 
from the status quo.

There's another discussion draft of GPLv3 in progress, I suppose I can at 
least wait until then...

> 2.  License Busybox in general as GPL v2 only, but allow other portions to
> be use a different license.  I know this is not at all Rob's goal, but I'm
> throwing it out there anyway.  The general license text somewhere on the
> website could state something like: "All code licensed under GPLv2, with the
> following exceptions".  Obviously, the project would want to limit what
> those licenses to a reasonable subset such as BSD, Apache, GPLv2 or later,
> etc.  However, that would really only be an issue when maintainers decide
> whether or not to add new stuff.

The upshot of which is that if you build BusyBox, the binary is GPLv2, but 
some of the source code can be used under other license terms in other 
projects.

It's already the case that some of the code is under other licenses, although 
some of the old licenses are only available from previous versions in SVN, or 
from whatever upstream source we looted it from.

For example, the very first drop of my bunzip2 code was dual licensed under 
the OSI license and the LGPL.  The OSI license went away pretty quickly, and 
the current version is under the BusyBox license, "GPLv2 or later".  An LGPL 
version's still on my personal website (possibly even the old OSI one), but 
that has nothing to do with BusyBox.

> I wouldn't personally see a problem with going either of those 2
> directions.  The second is more flexible, but less uniform.  This is a
> common trade-off in life in general, so no real surprise there ;-)

You may have noticed I have a strong tropism for simplicity and removing 
unnecessary cruft.  It's what drew me to BusyBox in the first place... :)

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.