The following came up in #gentoo-qa yesterday, in a discussion between mgorny, soap and myself.
Historically, all ebuilds in the Gentoo repository were licensed under GPL-2+. At a later point they were relicensed [1] to GPL-2. See [2] for a rationale (or absence of it, YMMV). However, in GLEP 76, GPL-2+ is listed as the first choice for licensing of any Gentoo project [3]. Also, I am not aware of any official policy that would forbid the "v2 or later" variant for ebuilds (any pointers are welcome). So, the question is, should we allow ebuilds # Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, v2 or later in the repository, or should we even encourage it for new ebuilds? I have somewhat mixed feelings about this. One the one hand, I think that GPL-2+ should generally be preferred because it offers better compatibility. For example, the compatibility clause in CC-BY-SA-4.0 won't work with GPL-2. On the other hand, we would presumably never achieve a complete transition to GPL-2+, so we would have ebuilds with either GPL variant in the tree. Not sure how big an issue that would be. Updating ebuilds wouldn't be a problem (as the old header would stay), but devs would have to spend attention to the header when copying code from one ebuild to another. Note that we could easily revert from GPL-2+ to GPL-2 if it would turn out to be too much trouble. Thoughts? Ulrich [1] https://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/articles/a-short-history-of-gentoo-copyright.html#relicensing-to-gpl-2 [2] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/7a857384b8929cb930329eb59e27636a [3] https://www.gentoo.org/glep/glep-0076.html#licensing-of-gentoo-projects
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