Re: [Kreatecd-devel] Licensing issues

[Alexander F. <Ale...@gm...>]

On Friday, 17. August 2001 23:03, Niels Reedijk wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Read this:
> http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-08-17-002-20-NW-CY
>
> This article really got me thinking. The
> "This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
> it 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."
>
> line is quite dangerous. what if the FSF (or whoever owns the license)
> decides to release a new version with a commercial clausule (so the fSF may
> sell commercial licenses...) we can't do anything about it.
>

Do you mean that they could write a new version of the license where FSF is 
allowd to sell kreatecd for money and forbid to copy kreatecd? I think this 
should be not possible as this "or any version later" is an optional choice 
of the user. 

The only thing that could happen - if version 3 has such a clause - that FSF 
does own development based upon kreatecd and license this under version 3 - 
because they have the choice to choose from version 2 and above - they can do 
that.

> What I want to say is, that I'm really shocked by this. I'm not saying that
> we actually should change license :-)
>
> (Though I'm thinking about removing the "or (at your option) any later
> version" clause).
>
> what do you think?

We could do that. But AFAIK all developers have to agree. As far as I 
understand we cannot change the license any more if one person is unable to 
act (e.g. he is dead, moved to a country where he cannot be reached or 
similar things).

If we change now to "version 2 only" we can only upgrade to version 3 (which 
might be better or worse) if all developers agree again.

I'm not a lawyer and don't know very much about these legal things. Where 
could we get more information about the pros and cons to remove the "license 
upgrade clause"

Alexander