On Fri, 13 Jul 2007 08:33:04 Steve Long wrote: > OFC you require all Gentoo ebuilds to be assigned to Gentoo-- that's fair > enough, I accept and support that. It just seems odd that we can't > contribute under GPL3 if we so choose. But yeah, all stuff in Gentoo is (C) > by the Foundation, and it's all available under GPL2 only. The Foundation > can aiui change that to any license it chooses, in the same way as the FSF > has changed the license for its copyrighted works to GPL3.
Hi Steve, I'm a bit late in replying to you, but I hope the following will clarify things. First the reason why gentoo is not GPL-2 or later. Basically doing so opens your software up to the whims of the FSF without allowing you to consider whether the new version of the license is desirable or not. With central copyright ownership (whether or not it is legal) it would not be an issue either because the foundation / gentoo technologies (in the time) could relicense it when needed. The second one, why not GPL-3. First of all, is an ebuild a derived work of skel.ebuild? Personally and as a trustee I have no idea of whether it is a derived work from skel.ebuild at all. Or whether skel.ebuild could be seen as a creative work in the sense of the Berne convention (International copyright threaty). What I know is that in general deciding this criterion for software is rather hard. Especially with something this short. One of the criteria is whether it would be straightforward to reproduce the code similarly without having seen the original. If you were to remove all comments from skel.ebuild this criterion seem likely to hold (IANAL). So depending your judgement or the legal advice you take (I can not tell you what is the truth, or what is the foundation position on this), you might be able to put any license desired on ebuilds you write yourself. Whether or not we would accept new ebuilds under GPL-3 or not, that is a different issue altogether. Currently all gentoo software that is not in the form of patches to other people's work is released under the GPL-2. At some point in time there used to be some policy about this, but it seems to have disappeared. Perhaps something that might be discussed. Paul -- Paul de Vrieze Gentoo Developer Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
