Alexandre Oliva wrote:
Anyone who had their heads in the sand for the past 18 months when GPLv3 was being publicly discussed and developed, or wasn't at the GCC Summit last year when I mentioned that the FSF would most certainly want to upgrade the license of every project whose copyright it held as soon as GPLv3 was ready, may indeed consider the license upgrade as a surprising new feature.
Not surprising, but significant. I think you greatly underestimate the cost and difficulty of upgrading to a new license for many large corporate users. This means getting lawyers involved, and for sure you don't want them wasting time tracking an 18 month period in which the license keeps changing. So you typically would wait till the license change was definite. All the version number change does is signal the need for initiating this process. Many of these users are not the kind of people who jump to every new latest-and-greatest version quickly anyway.
Now, why should we weaken our defenses
I am at a loss to understand this rhetoric, all we are talking about is what version number to use, how does this "weaken our defenses" (what defenses? against whom?).
