licensing issues with gpl3 due to the gpl2only limitation

[Matt Mackall]

On Fri, 2008-10-03 at 21:03 +0200, Ronny Pfannschmidt wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> in Pida we use some libs that are licensed under GPL3,
> so we are pretty screwed for the native mercurial integration cause we
> can't do any implicit re-licensing of any gpl2only code.

Oh no, another licensing thread.

I'm aware this is a huge bummer, but I'm still not interested in
changing the license. And the tragedy here is limited: several groups
have built very nice Mercurial integration using subprocesses.

> It would help if hg would change from gpl2only to something thats
> compatible with gpl3 (like gpl2+ for example).
> 
> Re-licensing the GPL3 libs is not an option and its hardly a help if we
> run into the next GPL3 lib.
> (Welcome to hell, big thanks to the FSF and Richard
> Stallmydevelopmentforfsckinglicenses)

Everyone who specifically licensed their code GPL2-only did so out of
concern that later FSF licenses would not be to their liking. Some of us
now feel fairly confirmed in this, frankly.

Similarly everyone who started off writing GPL3-only code did so knowing
that their code would be incompatible with all the existing software in
the former camp and decided that the GPLv3 was more important to them
than that compatibility.

It's not at all obvious to me that the former camp are the ones who
should give up their principles. After all, they chose to be
incompatible with us.

> On a unfair, mean, tactical sidenote: bzr is licensed gpl2+, so there
> won't be any license issues for making a native bzr integration.

Uh huh. Let me know when Launchpad is free.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.