The FSF's being stupid again, it seems...
Rich Felker
dalias at aerifal.cx
Thu Jun 29 04:49:33 UTC 2006
On Wed, Jun 28, 2006 at 04:38:45PM -0400, Rob Landley wrote:
> So apparently the FSF's mounted a campaign to get people to switch to BSD:
> http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/06/23/1728205&tid=150
>
> And I just thought I'd ping the list about changing our licensing page to say
> that if you have a statement about what exact version of busybox you used,
> with what .config file, and that you didn't modify it, then you don't need to
> provide the source code.
>
> Also, if GPLv3 actually _requires_ this (rather than just having a statement
> good for 3 years to provide the source code on request, as the GPLv2 has),
> that would be (to me) another reason to go for V2 only.
>
> Does anybody else have any opinions on this issue?
Yes. As long as BB code is GPL v2 or later, then you're not
_requiring_ anything more than GPL v2 requires. You're just making it
possible for people reusing the code to reuse it in both GPL v2 and
GPL v3 projects, which is a good thing.
If you don't like the added requirements of GPL v3, then using "v2 or
later" is the good solution. Using "v2 only" just makes life difficult
for other people and creates the very "added restrictions" that you
don't like by making it impossible to link to v3 code. Maybe not for
BB, but for some projects and some situations, the terms of v3 are
quite desirable.
Rich
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