>>>>> On Sat, 21 Sep 2019, Michał Górny wrote: > I'd like to propose to employ a more systematic method of resolving this > problem. I would like to add additional explicit 'GPL-n-only' licenses, > and discourage using short 'GPL-n' in favor of them. The end result > would be three licenses per every version/variant, e.g.:
> GPL-2-only -- version 2 only > GPL-2+ -- version 2 or newer > GPL-2 -- might be either, audit necessary To elaborate a bit more on this: "GPL-2" already has that well defined meaning that your proposed "GPL-2-only" has, namely that the package is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2. Presumably, your change would cause a long transition time, in which we would have *three* variants for every GPL version (as well as LGPL, AGPL, FDL), two of them with identical meaning. And after the transition time, we would have "GPL-2-only" instead of "GPL-2", which is not only longer but also not accurate. Plus, it would result in paradoxical entries like "|| ( GPL-2-only GPL-3-only )" for a package that can be distributed under GPL versions 2 or 3 but no later version. If the goal of this exercise is to do an audit of ebuilds labelled as "GPL-2", then a less intrusive approach (which I had already suggested when this issue had last been discussed) would be to add a comment to the LICENSE line, either saying "# GPL-2 only" for packages that have been verified. Or the other way aroung, starting with a comment saying that it is undecided, which would be removed after an audit. This would have the advantage not to confuse users, and have no impact on their ACCEPT_LICENSE settings. (For example, some people exclude AGPL and would have to add entries for AGPL-3-only.) Ulrich
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