Should we drop the "or later" after GPLv2?

Jason Schoon floydpink at gmail.com
Thu Aug 24 18:39:32 UTC 2006


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.

1.  Busybox moves to GPLv2 only.  This keeps Busybox in line with the Linux
kernel.  This makes sense in a lot of ways.  Despite how it may be extended
or changed, Busybox at its heart is really a set of utilities to get a Linux
system using a Linux kernel functional.  There are already pretty sweeping
dependencies and tight coupling with the kernel, so staying in step with it
makes quite a bit of sense.

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.

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 ;-)
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