Hello, it looks like I've been overly pessimistic (and/or pedantic), and the position from the FSF representative is that GPLv2+ is compatible with Apache and with GPLv3, which is very good news.
Thanks for the interesting discussion and your attention, Eric PS: Dimitry, I will send this email also to the Freeplane mailing list for the archives, should someone come later with similar concerns. -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [gnu.org #643378] Re: GPLv2+/Apache 2.0 explicitly/implicitly compatible with GPLv3+ Date: Sat, 04 Dec 2010 16:47:36 -0500 From: Yoni Rabkin via RT <[email protected]> Reply-To: [email protected] To: [email protected] Hello and thank you for writing in. > Questions: > 1. is Apache 2 compatible with GPLv2+, as it *implicitly* contains > GPLv3? yes > 2. is GPLv3 compatible with GPLv2+, as it *implicitly* contains GPLv3? yes (just a nit-pick: GPLv2+ doesn't really "contain" GPLv3; instead GPLv2+ allows you to distribute the software under GPLv3 (or later) without any further permission required from the copyright holder/s) > Or more practically expressed: > 1. do we need to *explicitly* re-license our program under GPLv3+ to > make it compatible with Apache 2? You don't need to relicense; but since your software will be _effectively_ under GPLv3+ there is no harm in doing it. > 2. if we would do this, would we need also to *explicitly* re-license > all the GPLv2+ libraries we're using (and possibly recursively all > libraries used by these libraries) You don't need to relicense here either; by licensing their software under GPLv2+ the authors of all of those libraries explicitly gave you permission to use their software under GPLv3. > I'm assuming that none of the libraries can be considered as a system > library. You are right again. If a particular library is a System Library you don't need to worry about all of the above when dealing with its licensing. I hope these answers are of help. -- I am not a lawyer, the above is not legal advice Regards, Yoni Rabkin ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ What happens now with your Lotus Notes apps - do you make another costly upgrade, or settle for being marooned without product support? Time to move off Lotus Notes and onto the cloud with Force.com, apps are easier to build, use, and manage than apps on traditional platforms. Sign up for the Lotus Notes Migration Kit to learn more. http://p.sf.net/sfu/salesforce-d2d _______________________________________________ Freemind-developer mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freemind-developer
