Robert Dewar wrote: >One could of course just take a blanket view that everything >on the site is, as of a certain moment, licensed under GPLv3 >(note you don't have to change file headers to achieve this, >the file headers have no particular legal significance in >any case).
According to http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html, the file headers are precisely the place to make the license grant. > >That at least would be clean, and anyone concerned with >accepting GPLv3 stuff would simply know that as of this >date and time, they should no longer download ANYTHING >from the entire gnu.org site. > >That's actually not so terrible, you lose some users >temporarily, but at least there is no misunderstanding. There would be gross misunderstanding! Placing everything on gnu.org under GPLv3 does nothing to affect all of its mirrors. So if I download gcc-4.2.0.tar.bz2 from ftp.gnu.org then it's GPLv3, but if I download it from any of the mirrors then it's GPLv2. Surely the aim of the process should be to eliminate "gotchas" as much as possible. Everyone has the responsibility to verify that they have a license before using someone else's code. How could I, as the recipient of a file which says "GPLv2" etc at the top, know that it was downloaded from gnu.org and is actually really GPLv3?
