On Monday 26 July 2004 7:52 pm, Anupam Jain wrote: > > That got me thinking.. the GPL says that GPL'd software can be distributed > under the GNU GPL version 2 OR "at your option, any later version"! So does > that mean that FSF can someday release a GPL version 3 with properietary > clauses and effectively un-GPL in spirit, ALL the free software in the > world? They can even grant FSF all ownership rights to all GPL'd software > and turn into the next MS! Scary!
You, as a recipient of the software whose licence you are reading, have to right to re-distribute this software either under GPL v2 or v3 and so on. These are the rights that you are reading. You can change the licence under which it can be redistributed under GPL v2+. The FSF has no say in that. So even if FSF changes their licence to one scripted by the devil, nothing changes for the software that you hold in your hand. You and everybody who has this copy can still distribute it freely under the v2 licence. And even if a new version of GPL comes, it is the *software developer*, and not FSF who decides which version of GPL the future versions of the software has to follow. Dont blame FSF for the licence - blame the software developer for the licence that he has chosen to use. I trust FSF that it wont change from the path that it has set out, so I dont have any such fears. They are far far better than the other end - where M$ puts clauses in the licence that they can change the EULA whenever they want - and they have on occasions done that, and made it more restrictive (e.g. XP SP1 and Visual Studio). - Sandip -- Sandip Bhattacharya sandip (at) puroga.com Puroga Technologies Pvt. Ltd. Work: http://www.puroga.com Home: http://www.sandipb.net GPG: 51A4 6C57 4BC6 8C82 6A65 AE78 B1A1 2280 A129 0FF3 _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
