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GPL: either version 3 of the license, or any later version (Announce)

posted by ecm Homepage E-mail, Düsseldorf, Germany, 28.05.2011, 00:55

> GPL licenses allow for upgrades to future versions of the license; that is
> a feature of the license.
Unless they changed that for v3 and I didn't notice, it isn't part of the license's own text. There were some issues with projects changing their licensing notices which usually read "GPL v2 or any later version" or something like that to specifically say "GPL v2" ruling out GPL v3 compatibility (because they didn't like v3).

Ah, quoting your COPYING.TXT (part of "14. Revised Versions of this License."):

> Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the
> Program specifies that a certain numbered version of the GNU General
> Public License "or any later version" applies to it, you have the
> option of following the terms and conditions either of that numbered
> version or of any later version published by the Free Software
> Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of the
> GNU General Public License, you may choose any version ever published
> by the Free Software Foundation.
So while the license describes the possibility of works which can be re-licensed under later versions, you do either have to specify the "or any later version" phrasing somewhere, or you have to never mention any version at all, to allow upgrading. Therefore I would say the upgrading (still) isn't an inherent feature of the license.

I didn't find that in your documentation. For example, .\README.TXT only mentions the license file in the file list as

> COPYING.TXT The GNU General Public License, Version 3
where of course it correctly specifies that particular version because that's what the file contains. No direct statement is made about which license applies to your software.

USERDOCS\README.TXT does not appear to contain any statement on the GPL.

The other documentation files do not appear to contain any GPL statements either. (Didn't look through them in detail though.)

http://code.google.com/p/mtcp/ says "GNU GPL v3" without "or any later version".

However, I think this is all irrelevant because your source code files do appear to say (didn't check every file):

> mTCP is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
> it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
> the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
> (at your option) any later version.
As far as I'm concerned, though of course I'm not a lawyer, this properly indicates that you allow the license upgrade. (Though explicit statements in the documentation pointing this out sure wouldn't hurt.)

---
l

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