On 5/20/19 11:09 PM, J Lovejoy wrote: >> On May 20, 2019, at 3:35 PM, Allison Randal <allison@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> >> - If the notice gives no version number, the standard interpretation is >> that the user can take that as any version of the GPL, which technically >> would be 1.0-or-later. But, it would also be fine to take the file as >> 2.0-or-later, which was generally legally preferred. It was not >> preferred to use 2.0-only in the case of no version number, because it's >> very possible that existing users are already using the standard >> interpretation to take those files as GPLv3, and we don't want to cause >> them problems. (On the flip side, it's massively unlikely that anyone is >> using the standard interpretation to take those files as GPLv1, so we >> can safely drop it.) > > Considering we have no caselaw on what is “legally preferred” (which is otherwise a vague term we probably ought to avoid :) - and that the GPL text itself states: Sorry for the vagueness, I was dancing around Chatham House Rule. What I meant was that specific people in the room (no names, but ask me off-list if you don't remember and want to know) said that we should drop GPL 1.0, because "choose any version ever published" allows us to choose to include 1.0 or not, and because there are certain ambiguities in the text of 1.0 that make it worthwhile to drop it. > "If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.” > > Then, where you have a license notice in file such as, > > "May be copied or modified under the terms of the GNU General Public License" > > —> SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-1.0-or-later > > While I agree that practically speaking, most people are probably not going to go back to GPL-1.0 - I don’t think we should deviate from what the license explicitly says, i.e., “you may choose any version ever published…” that clearly includes GPL-1.0. > > From the lengthy conversations about this kind of thing on SPDX legal team calls, this conclusion was pretty non-controversial/everyone agreed. > > So, I don’t think we should do something different here for any reason. It only muddles things. No one was claiming that an unversioned GPL universally means 2.0-or-later, only that it means we have the option to choose versions. And since we have the option to choose, we should choose 2.0-or-later. Allison
