On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 11:31 AM, Niels Möller nisse@lysator.liu.se wrote:
I believe I gave you concrete examples of projects that have issues. I add here that my GPLv2 project [0] has issues since because of gmp it can only be distributed under GPLv3.
That appears to be GPLv2 or (user's option) later, (I just looked at the header on one file, so I may have missed something). If so, this is the first time I hear anybody having problems with GPLv2+ and LGPLv3.
Well there is first time for everything :) The issue here is that I have chosen GPLv2+ and _not_ GPLv3+, and the license of GMP forces me to distribute under GPLv3+. Note that GPLv2+ says, "you can distribute under this license ... or (at your option) any later version". Now the "at your option" part is gone and I am forced to distribute under GPLv3+. If I wanted to release my code under GPLv3+ I would have done it already.
I think the recomended way (http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Licensing-of-GNU-Packages) is to put a dual licensing notice in every source file.
I wouldn't go into that. I see the GPLv2+/LGPLv3+ dual license as a temporal solution until FSF solves that issue either by releasing LGPLv4 or something similar. Also you are most probably not required to have the precise boilerplate on every file. If you see other gnu projects (i.e. gnulib) their license terms are made explicit in the module text files rather than the .c/h files (that typically contain a GPLv2+ boilerplate).
CUPS seems to be the most well-known example of a GPLv2-only program which uses (or should use) gnutls, which then depends on gmp and nettle. I know almost nothing about CUPS. So if GMP relicensing is required to suit CUPS' needs, then it would be encouraging if someone who actually *knows* CUPS (both technically and the licensing/policy issues) would step forward and be willing to discuss it.
I really don't understand what is there to discuss but please contact them directly if you think there is something that needs to be discussed (if you check my previous mails an the discussion in gmplib there are more packages than CUPS with that issue). As I said I don't care about handling the case on an individual case for each package (that may even have already reverted to using openssl due to the long time taken to handle the issue), but rather solving the GPLv2 incompatibility issue in gnutls.
regards, Nikos