[darcs-devel] [issue2375] upgrade to GPLv3

[Ben Franksen]

Stephen Turnbull wrote:
> god writes:
> 
>  > It's better to that earlier than later - the problem will only get
>  > worse over time and you might be stuck in the same mess with outdated
>  > license as GNU/Linux kernel for example.
> 
> Last I heard neither Linus nor David Roundy (who AFAIK still holds
> copyright on a lot of Darcs) thinks that GPLv2 is "outdated".
> 
> In the case of the kernel, the "mess" is simply the mess that any kind
> of fanaticism produces, since either you're in kernel space and you
> can either be GPLv2 or use Linus's special exception for modules that
> use only public APIs, or you're not in kernel space and you can do
> what you want -- there's no legal mess in practice for the kernel
> (except for people who want to import GPLv3 code into the kernel, I
> guess, but how many people want to do that?  Emacs in the kernel, what
> a great idea!)
> 
> For Darcs the situation is a bit different, and potentially messy.  It
> depends on how much GPLv3 software is becoming part of the GHC ecology
> that Darcs links to.

It is very unlikely that this will become a problem for Darcs. The important 
Haskell library projects are practically all BSD/MIT style licensed and most 
people in the community agree that this is ok.

Cheers
Ben
-- 
"Make it so they have to reboot after every typo." -- Scott Adams