On Tue, 2017-04-04 at 15:05 +0200, Eduard Braun wrote:
Yeah, but why all the effort of getting approval from authors of GPL3 licensed files in Inkscape's codebase to publish them as GPLv2+ instead if we now start to include GPLv3 code again?
I should make the distinction between policy and legality. It's current policy to make things GPLv2+, but you'll notice we still (I think) have a couple of GPLv3 bits from gimp and we're not working on resolving.
Also this was what you told me when I wanted to include Scour (which uses the Apache license and would actually have been allowed in a GPLv3 (not v2 though) project.
Yes, because having incompatible licenses does cause issue. Debian can choose to distribute Inkscape under GPLv3, in fact they could choose to do so without a single GPLv3 because the license allows it.
The advantage I was trying to communicate is that a GPLv2+ codebase could be moved to GPLv3 by /anyone/ not just the author, while an Apache2 licensed codebase could be encapsulated by anyone into a GPLv3 license. Thus allowing them to be combined into a single project under GPLv3 without having to ask any original authors.
Best Regards, Martin Owens