licensing issues with gpl3 due to the gpl2only limitation

Matt Mackall mpm at selenic.com
Wed Oct 8 02:51:26 CDT 2008


On Wed, 2008-10-08 at 00:20 -0700, Eric M. Hopper wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-10-07 at 22:53 +0200, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
> > Am Samstag 04 Oktober 2008 01:24:15 schrieb Matt Mackall:
> > > 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.
> > 
> > For example because they were concerned about weaknesses in GPLv2. Or
> > like some of the improvements in the GPLv3. 
> > 
> > So it means, we are in camps, now... why?
> > 
> > Am I your "enemy", because I like GPLv3+ and use it for most code I
> > publish wherever I don't link against GPLv2-only programs (except
> > where I write code which is intended to mostly be used as backend by
> > existing projects)?
> 
> I feel very similarly to you on this.  I don't really understand why
> people don't like the GPLv3.  It seems like in almost all ways a better
> license than the GPLv2.

For starters, it's incompatible with a lot of the installed base. Which
is the whole point of this discussion. I've got reasons why I might
choose not to use the GPLv3 today, but they're irrelevant to Mercurial,
because Mercurial's license was set in stone before GPLv3 existed. I
only had the FSF's most recent disaster, the GFDL, to go on.

Guys, I'm really tired of the license threads. The license is what it
is, it is a gigantic effort to change it, it's not going to change
unless an even more gigantic benefit appears, and every minute I spend
reading or writing about it means less time doing something useful. I'd
rather see threads about rewriting Mercurial in Ruby, which I won't feel
obligated to read or comment on.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.



More information about the Mercurial-devel mailing list