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Comment by CJefferson

9 years ago

Except, I work on GPL v2 systems, and we can't link to GPL v3 libraries. No other license I've worked with has this incompatiblity problem.

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CJefferson

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zeveb  9 years ago

> Except, I work on GPL v2 systems, and we can't link to GPL v3 libraries.

The standard way to use GPL v2 is to use this verbiage:

    This program 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 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

If someone doesn't do that, I don't know what to say.

  • detaro  9 years ago

    That's the wrong direction. You can use v2 code with that sentence in the license in a v3 codebase, not vice-versa (unless you upgrade your codebase to v3 entirely, but since GPLv2 was explicitly mentioned that probably is not an option for whatever reason).

  • CJefferson  9 years ago

    At some point in the far distant past, someone decided they didn't want to give the FSF the ability to apply any license they like to their software (which is reasonable, the FSF could in principle make GPL v4 -- All your source are belong to us).

    While that choice might have been a mistake, it would now be an impossible effort to get all contributor's permission to change, so we are stuck with v2.