Ok, I understand that this is trying to be decent and reasonable people here, in cases where it's truly an accident of including some GPL code. Shit happens, clean it up.<p>If I were to do this with commercial code or assets, would they be so flexible in working with me, or do they go straight to shakedown? I'll give ye all a hint: go look at the MPAA and RIAA's views on that.<p>I remembered when friends were back in the Napster times shook down for a few grand. Same with Bittorrent's earlier years. There was no amicable "Plz quit this and were good". In fact, they've lobbied multiple times for laws to permanently disconnect after X copyright claims.<p>So, why should the Open Source community be so damned forgiving when we're surrounded by entities who'd eat every last one of us for lunch if we so much as accidentally used a copyrighted resource?<p>(I'm thinking no further than Netflix ripping off a photographer <a href="https://petapixel.com/2017/11/27/netflix-stole-vhs-cassette-photos-stranger-things-boxed-set/" rel="nofollow">https://petapixel.com/2017/11/27/netflix-stole-vhs-cassette-...</a> . Good luck for an Australian citizen to navigate international copyright law to become whole in this regard. )
For anyone wondering about the image in the header with a stylized Stallman as a Vishnu-like being, it's from Hackaday staff artist Joe Kim.<p><a href="http://theartofjoekim.tumblr.com/" rel="nofollow">http://theartofjoekim.tumblr.com/</a>
Doesn't this clause seems not backwards compatible with GPLv2?<p>At face value GPLv3 seems more constrained - so it's easy to relicense an existing v2 project. You just tell everyone working on it, okay, now every addition we make has extra requirements (if you want the looser version, you can grab an older copy of our project from when we switched licenses)<p>Loosening the license on pre-existing code is sorta like if you wanted to make the project (like the Linux kernel) BSD. You'd have to have everyone who has already contributed to agree to loosen the license on their work. If one person thinks "Hell no! I want people to be severely punished" then you're in for a headache.<p>So then GPLv3 isn't a "superset" and compatible GPLv2? Or did am I misunderstanding something?
The GPL ship has sailed. It used to be every free license could be converted to GPL, so it became the "universal recipient" license. Then Stallman forked it and created two incompatible GPL's, effectively killing his own dream of a copyleft ecosystem. So the only sane thing now is "universal donor" licenses like MIT - or straight public domain. I'm stealing all of this from Rob Landley.<p><a href="https://ia601008.us.archive.org/7/items/OhioLinuxfest2013/24-Rob_Landley-The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Copyleft.mp3" rel="nofollow">https://ia601008.us.archive.org/7/items/OhioLinuxfest2013/24...</a>
The funny thing is that gpl is mostly used by per profit companies creating a two licensing system. Gpl is great to test drive before buying a commercial license, but other than it’s pretty much ignored except maybe in academia.