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Comment by anticristi | Hacker News Reader

Kind of ironic that RMS campained against proprietary software to allow reuse of code. Now we have two islands of open source code ... .

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RMS advises to use "GPLv2 or any later version", which is compatible with GPLv3, instead of "GPLv2 only" license.

"or any later" is controversial. It essentially puts your project under the agenda of the FSF, which not everyone wants.

Doesn't "GPLv2 or any later version" mean that you can use the software under the terms of GPLv2 or GPLv3 (or some hypothetical GPLv4)?

It can't possibly add any restrictions to the use of your project, because people can always just use it under the terms of GPLv2 if they want.

I guess it could remove restrictions, if the hypothetical GPLv4 was a total 180 and looked more like the MIT or Apache licenses, so I guess if that's a concern then you have a point.

If a new version of the GPL adds restrictions, that still can be undesirable for the writer if the original software.

If a third party forks a GPLv2+ project, adding features that are GPLv3+ licensed, the result is GPLv3+ licensed.

That means those wanting the GPLv2 licensed project won’t be able to use those new features.

One could also suggest that the BFD project adopt "GPLv2 or any later version" (like it had prior to 2008), which is compatible with the GPLv2, instead of the "GPLv3 or any later version" license.

At least you can legally build it locally, just not distribute the result. That's still better than what's possible with proprietary software.

As drran mentioned, I'm sure RMS would say the problem here is that Linux is licensed under v2 only. Linus of course would disagree.

There is proprietary "source available" software that I can compile locally but not distribute the result either. The GPLv2/3 disaster is not an improvement.

Two? Are the AGPL licenses compatible? How about GPL licenses with exceptions for some APIs as used by OpenJDK?

The AGPL licenses are explicitly compatible with the GPL ones. FWIW, this issue is essentially entirely caused by Linus, who refuses to use or accept GPL3.

> FWIW, this issue is essentially entirely caused by Linus, who refuses to use or accept GPL3.

That's a bit disingenuous. Linus has said no to the GPLv3, yes, but his reasons for doing so have merit.

The very fact that the GPL v3 is incompatible with v2 indicates that v2 has something the v3 takes away, no matter how well-meaning that was.

What the GPL3 takes a way is a loophole to violate the spirit of the GPL without violating the letter of the GPL2.

Linus's reasons for causing this issue having merit does not mean he wasn't entirely the cause of the issue: those are unrelated axes.

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