Moving to GPLv3 - the practical side of it

[Mats Lidell]

Hi,

Stephen J. Turnbull writes:
>> No.  We should clean up the existing code base first.  A partly GPLv3
>> code base is undistributable.  Technically since we're not
>> incorporated we can't even share it with each other, although the FSF
>> is unlikely to get on our case for that.

This sounds a little like a catch-22 situation. It would be more practical to 
sync with the GPLv3 version immediately but that isn't possible!? 

If I understand correctly then cleaning up the code base means that all files 
must be acounted for and they must be moved to a GPLv2 compatible license. 
This will be distributable. From there we can go on to GPLv3. (And that last 
step should then be trivial?) Is this correct?

>> They *must* have a GPLv3 compatible license.  That includes public
>> domain (not really a license), (new) BSD, etc, but *not* GPLv2,
>> Mozilla, etc.  Many of these files are may be broken from the time
>> that we got them from GNU, in which case we win by syncing to current
>> GNU, most likely.  (GNU had a pile of issues, not as many was we do,
>> but it still held them up for a couple months.)

So the strategy would then be to look for the coresponding file in GNU before 
they moved to GPLv3 and use that?

>> If it's copyright by somebody with a pile of lawyers (I can think of
>> Sun and IBM offhand) we need to check with their lawyers.

But only if that can't be replaced using the same strategy as above. To me it 
seems hard to find anyone who would give us these rights. It could easilly 
take a very long time. 

What I'm really looking for is a plan how to do this so that I, and hopefully 
others as well, can start working on the migration.

Yours
-- 
%% Mats