On 16/07/17 12:47, Alessandro Vesely wrote:
May I ask, in passing, why Debian (for packages like apt, say) as well as Linux did not switch to GPLv3? Would such switch ease enforcement?
Switching a project over from GPLv2-only to GPLv3-only or GPLv3-or-later requires either (a) the consent of all copyright holders who made non-trivial contributions or (b) the wholesale replacement of all material written by the non-consenting copyright holders.
Thus, for any project which does not require contributors to sign a document either ceding their copyright in their contributions to the project's proprietor or granting said proprietor authority to relicence, it can be *really hard* to make such a transition in a lawful and timely manner (and one sufficiently-important non-consentor can basically shoot down the entire proposal).
In the particular case of the Linux kernel, *Linus* didn't want to move to GPLv3 (because he didn't think certain clauses were a good idea), so the move was a dead letter almost from the moment it was proposed.
