Dear all,

I received an email from a user telling me that another package that depends on 
my package is licensed GPL(>=3), whereas mine is licensed GPL-2; and that 
therefore, the other package is in violation of its GPL-3 license. This 
apparently causes an issue with the Debian packaging system, throwing that 
other package into the "unstable" category.

Moreover, the correspondent asks me if I would consider changing the license 
for my package. To what is not specified, but I guess it would be to GPL-3.

I don't really understand why this isn't the other developer's problem and not 
mine. But on the other hand, I don't want to cause problems for others. The 
licensing stuff is hard for me to understand - in large part because of low 
motivation to dig into it; I really would rather think about providing better 
code and features than all sorts of legal gobble-de-gook. Nonetheless, I guess 
this stuff is important to some people (e.g., Debian) so I suppose I had better 
get it right.

My decision to put GPL-2 in the first place was primarily expedience: it seemed 
like what people wanted. So is GPL-3 "better"? Do I risk anything by changing 
it? Do I risk anything by not changing it? How much does it matter, really?

Thanks

Russ

Russell V. Lenth  -  Professor Emeritus
Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science   
The University of Iowa  -  Iowa City, IA 52242  USA   
Voice (319)335-0712 (Dept. office)  -  FAX (319)335-3017

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