On Jul 13, 2007, Nicholas Nethercote <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > One way to view it: the license is a feature. Therefore changing the > license is changing a feature.
Every release of GCC in the past decade (and then some) was GPLv2+. GPLv3 has always been one of the options. Anyone who had their heads in the sand for the past 18 months when GPLv3 was being publicly discussed and developed, or wasn't at the GCC Summit last year when I mentioned that the FSF would most certainly want to upgrade the license of every project whose copyright it held as soon as GPLv3 was ready, may indeed consider the license upgrade as a surprising new feature. But anyone who wanted to participate was welcome to do so, and GPLv3 shouldn't be a surprise for anyone who did, or even just watched it from a distance. Now, why should we weaken our defenses for the sake of those who didn't plan for something that could have been so easily forecast 18 months ago, and that was even planned to be finished 4 months ago? Heck, the last-call draft, published one month before the final release, was so close to the final release that non-insider lawyers who were on top of the process managed to emit solid opinions about the final license the day after it was released. It's those who didn't do their homework and didn't plan ahead for this predictable upgrade who should be burdened now, rather than all of us having to accept weaker defenses for our freedoms or facing additional requirements on patches or backports. It was all GPLv2+, and this means permission for *anyone* to upgrade to GPLv3+. The license upgrade path is the easy path, and that's by design. -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ FSF Latin America Board Member http://www.fsfla.org/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer [EMAIL PROTECTED], gcc.gnu.org} Free Software Evangelist [EMAIL PROTECTED], gnu.org}
