On Monday, 9. July 2007, Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:
Gerhard Killesreiter schrieb:
Erdem Köse schrieb:
Are there any thoughts about releasing Drupal 6 with GPLv3[1]?
Yes: Won't happen. It would be quite hard to get all people who contributed code to agree to a change of license.
For example, Dries has blogged that he actually likes the "services loophole" in the GPLv2 that GPLv3 closes.
Actually, I was wrong about this, the services "loophole" isn't closed by GPLv3.
Correct. The relatively new "Affero GPL" is a license that closes the services loophole. The GPL was never intended to do so, and instead focuses on better internationalization and closing a few unintended holes (Tivoization and Microsoft/Novell-style patent agreements). Apart from this, the GPL did not change its meaning (even if the wording changed quite a lot), and it's supposed to stay that way, at least from the FSF's viewpoint of protecting the "four freedoms". That said, I would highly welcome Drupal and its modules to adopt proper copyright headers for each file. At the current state, one cannot determine if a file was supposed to be GPLv2 only, or "GPLv2 or later", or even find out who holds the copyright for a specific piece of code. Without knowing the copyright holders, you'll have a harder time when it comes to actual legal incidents, and it would be impossible to change licenses (e.g. switch to GPLv3) even if we all wanted to.