Re: Overview of copyright issues

[Hans Aberg]

On 10 Sep 2009, at 09:42, Reinhold Kainhofer wrote:

> Am Donnerstag, 10. September 2009 09:30:57 schrieb Hans Aberg:
> > > I'm not a lawyer, but if I came across "v2 or latest" wording, my
> > > advice would be to treat it as "v2 only" because to do anything else
> > > IS TOO DANGEROUS. So your wording is self-defeating because no sane
> > > distributor would dare take advantage of the "or latest" clause.
> >
> > That seems to be the case: at least for new restrictions, "or later"
> > essentially useless.
>
> No, it's rather essential. Imagine someone wants to create a fork of  
> LilyPond,
> where he directly links to gs instead of calling the binary. He'll  
> be out of
> luck, because gs is GPL v3(+?), while LilyPond is GPL v2only. The  
> "or later"
> allows to link GPL v3 libraries...

He link as he wish, as long as the distribution does not violate any  
individual terms.

> > So it is probably simplest to just update the license when you have
> > time. All these GPLs are probably reasonable for LilyPond
>
> You can't simply go around and change licenses, unless you are the  
> copyright
> holder!

But you are the copyright owner of the LilyPond code.

> That's the paperwork that is needed: Every contributor, who has until
> now contributes as GPL v2only, needs to agree to change his/her  
> contributions
> to GPL v2+. Unless you track down every substantial contributor (git  
> helps in
> that regard), LilyPond can't switch to GPL v2+.

Why? Is there a GNU requirement? - My cursory reading of v3 did not  
find anything like that. Where does this idea come from?

  Hans