<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Antoine, Werner, Rod et al.<div>Openmoko's 'preferred' license is GPL v3 and LGPL v3. 'preferred' is meant in the smartest way you can think of.</div><div>upstream license preference trumps Openmoko's, or else we wouldn't be using that whole piece of software.</div><div>For the kernel, I think upstream accepts "v2 or later", so that's what we do because v3 would not be accepted. If upstream does not even accept "or later", then we do just "v2".</div><div><br></div><div>I explained these preferences to xiangfu a while back, but everybody please remember that there is a big language barrier between people with good/very good English skills, and those just learning.</div><div>I think a patch that changes the license terms in someone else's source codes is unacceptable.</div><div><br></div><div>If you make large changes (more than 20 lines I would say) to a source file, you should update the copyright years, i.e. add the current year. If there is a year at all in the file. I don't know whether the years should be in every file, if not I would prefer to not have them at all in each file, just in COPYING or so.</div><div>You never change the license terms in a file that is not entirely written by yourself, not even subtly by adding "or later", let alone changing the license version from v2 to v3. If you want to do that, you need permission by all the other authors of the file.</div><div><br></div><div>Antoine - thank you very much for bringing this up!</div><div>Best Regards,</div><div>Wolfgang</div><div><br></div><div><div><div>On Sep 17, 2008, at 1:15 AM, Antoine Reid wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 1:00 PM, Werner Almesberger <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:werner@openmoko.org" target="_blank">werner@openmoko.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> <div>xiangfu wrote:<br> > /* Smedia Glamo 336x/337x driver<br> > *<br> > - - * (C) 2007 by OpenMoko, Inc.<br> > + * (C) 2008 by OpenMoko, Inc.<br> > * Author: Harald Welte <<a href="mailto:laforge@openmoko.org" target="_blank">laforge@openmoko.org</a>><br> <br> </div>In cases where there is actual content that's been copied (and not just<br> the copyright notice itself), I would suggest to update copyright<br> notices by adding the new years or by using a range, e.g.,<br> <br> * (C) 2007, 2008 by OpenMoko, Inc.<br> <br> * (C) 2007-2008 by OpenMoko, Inc.<br> <br> or even<br> <br> * (C) 2007, 2009-2010 by OpenMoko, Inc.<br> <br> (in case nobody worked on that file in 2008.)<br> <font color="#888888"><br> - Werner<br> <br> </font></blockquote></div><br><br>Also how about the change from GPLv2 to GPLv3? Is all the code going to be GPLv3 now? The license already says "either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version." which lets people use the code in a GPLv3 application. Changing the license to require a minimum of GPLv3 would (in my opinion, I am NOT a lawyer) prevent someone from using some of this code in a GPLv2 application...<br clear="all"> <br>Is this change to GPLv3 intentional? Not that I am for or against any specific version of the GPL but this seems like a subtle way of changing the licensing terms in a patch whose description is "just change the Copyright year from 2007 to 2008.". Maybe I missed another thread discussing this..?<br> <br><br>.02$<br>antoine<br><br>-- <br>Antoine Reid<br> </div></blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>