[development] GPLv3 is announced

[Jakob Petsovits]

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.