Hi, On Wed, 2026-07-15 at 13:25 -0700, Soren Stoutner wrote: > > > *principles* of the DFSG and not with the DFSG itself. However, if you > > > extend the *principles* of the DFSG to hardware as well as software, I > > > think it is completely accurate to say that anyone who thinks it is > > > generally bad for a developer to license their software under the GPLv3 > > > (as > > > was stated by Ansgar earlier in this thread) fundamentally disagrees with > > > the *principles* of the DFSG.
That is obviously bullshit. > Like I said earlier, I don’t have any objection to any developer choosing to > use any DFSG license. What I object to is people making blanket statements > that the GPLv3 is bad and developers should avoid it. > > There are a number of people inside of Debian who hate the GPLv3, but I think > they are a very small number of people. There are a much larger number of > people outside of Debian who hate the GPLv3. Excluding a large developer base from contributing seems counter- productive. Excluding interoperation with large amount of code that is GPL-2-only and forcing people to rewrite that code for purity reasons also seems counter-productive and makes people unhappy. And changing a license retroactively is very hard for community projects that don't require handing over all copyright to some possibly questionable central legal entity (like FSF projects do). Making it impossible for Debian to ship both GPL-2-only software and using GCC as a system compiler also seems counter-productive. Currently this works by just ignoring (or claiming they don't apply) GPL-2 clauses: we cannot distribute all source code that ends in GPL-2-only binaries under GPL-2-compatible licenses, namely for example not GCC. The GPL-2 has an exception, but that only applies "unless that component itself accompanies the executable". We have to either ignore that entirely or claim pretty much everything Debian ships doesn't "accompany" the other half of Debian... Doing this as a license change for newer versions just is not very nice. (And what was that clause originally for? Non-GPL-2-compatible OS vendors shipping coreutils & other GPL-2 stuff presumably? So intended to forbid exactly what Debian is doing?) Note that this would not happen with Clang's license... Or without copyright assignment to the FSF. Nor if GCC didn't change their license later from GPL-2-or-later to only-GPL-3-or-later. > They hate it because it doesn’t > just allow people to use the freedoms of the DFSG, but it *enforces* those > freedoms in derivatives. To paraphrase your claim: people who license code under GPL-3-only or GPL-3-or-later hate the freedom of users to run GPL-2-only code and fundamentally disagree with the *principles* of the DFSG and Open Source software, and want Debian as it exists to go away. Ansgar
