Not really, no. Take a look at the Linux kernel licensing. You can't license it as anything but GPL 2, because some of the code *doesn't* have "or later version", so it is explicitly 2.0 Now, it is a pretty fair bet that most of the people who contributed the code wouldn't mind, but...
On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 4:39 PM, Wenig, Stefan <[email protected]>wrote: > > To my knowledge you can't re-license code you don't own the copyright > > of. > > True, but the community _could_ make a decision together if they really > wanted. > > > Not sure if this is a problem, but I could imagine that code which is > > ported > > from Java has to inherit the same license. > > Funny, now that you mention it, Java-Hibernate doesn't specify the LGPL > version either! > > /* > * Hibernate, Relational Persistence for Idiomatic Java > * > * Copyright (c) 2010, Red Hat Inc. or third-party contributors as > * indicated by the @author tags or express copyright attribution > * statements applied by the authors. All third-party contributions are > * distributed under license by Red Hat Inc. > * > * This copyrighted material is made available to anyone wishing to use, > modify, > * copy, or redistribute it subject to the terms and conditions of the GNU > * Lesser General Public License, as published by the Free Software > Foundation. > * > * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, > * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of > MERCHANTABILITY > * or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public > License > * for more details. > * > * You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License > * along with this distribution; if not, write to: > * Free Software Foundation, Inc. > * 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor > * Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA > */ > > SVN contains lgpl.txt with v2.1, but I guess that really means nothing. > > On hibernate.org it says v2.1. Again, void. > > > What I don't understand is that they're concerned about what to provide > > for > > reverse engineering but at the same time they're developing a GPL v3 > > application? > > I think he didn't say they're using it, just that this would be an > advantage. He probably guessed that nobody would care enough about only > pleasing his lawyers ;-) > >
