Moving to GPLv3 - the practical side of it
Mats Lidell writes:
Now comes the practical side of it. If I apply that script the
patch will be rather big and it will at best only take care of the
files that clearly has a GPLv2 license and change that into
GPLv3. Would that be an acceptable way to go?
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.
- There seems to be quite a few files with no clear license. What
does that mean or imply for a move to GPLv3? Shall or must we
keep them as is or can they be move to GPLv3?
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.)
- And how about item #13 [see Jerry James analysis] which are
copyrighted by IBM. Even though they don't have a stated license
that seems still to be a problem to me. Can they really be used
with GPLv3?
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.
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