Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
On Sunday 27 May 2007, Isidore Ducasse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote about 'Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: Sun and GPL':Or did you mean dual-licensing GPLv2 and GPLv3?Still, dual-licensing under incompatible licenses is fine and I think many (but maybe not most) developers that currently license their code under GPLv2 will be willing to license under the GPLv3 as well (or instead).
Note that while you can dual-license on ANY licenses you want (say the MS EULA and the GPLv3, for example), you can't just change licenses (even to add a new one) without the permission of the copyright holder.
So, Duncan's idea of dual-licensing the kernel under GPL v2/v3 until all bits of kernel code written by non-agreeing parties are removed would not work.
The issue isn't one of "adding restrictions", but basic copyright law. Distributing copyrighted software is illegal - unless you have a license. The copyright holder gets to pick the license. I can't take my copy of MS Windows and decide to dual-license it as BSD, although Microsoft could (assuming they fully own the copyrights). In the same way, Linus can't just release the whole kernel as GPL v2/v3 unless all the copyright holders agree.
He probably could make it dual license on a module-by-module basis. Some modules would be GPLv2, and some would be GPL v2/v3 (both have to be supported to allow linking with GPLv2 code). Other GPLv3 projects could then borrow code from the dual-licensed modules, although those modules could not borrow code from GPL v3 projects, as they have to retain the v2 license. In practice none of the benefits of v3 would be available until the whole module is cleaned of v2-only code, at which point they could drop v2 and be v3-clean (and hopefully they'll make it v3+ this time).
Things are much cleaner for the FSF - they hold the copyrights on all their code, so they can license things any way they want. That requires a bit of trust to work, and I'm not sure it is the best model. Sure, with RS in charge I'm not worried, but nobody lives forever...
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