Closed davidhedlund closed 6 years ago
I think this issue deserves a high priority. A lot of developers that distributed their add-ons under:
I agree this issue should be prioritized. For reference:
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/rms-article-for-claritys-sake-please-dont-say-licensed-under-gnu-gpl-2
https://spdx.org/news/news/2018/01/license-list-30-released
Clarified Identifiers for GNU Licenses
In a collaborative effort between the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the SPDX working group to help facilitate clarity and better license identification practices, we have updated the short identifiers for the GNU family of licenses to support more precise and consistent usage. ... As such, the next release of the SPDX License List v3.0 will reflect the changes to the GNU family of licenses following this pattern:
GPL-2.0-only GPL-2.0-or-later
Why 3.0 and not 2.7?
A major version numbering change was used with this release to act as a clear signal to users of the license list, that this release wasn’t a business as usual. Given the significance of the changes on how licenses are represented internally, new tooling is now possible to improve the fidelity of license recognition. In addition, the short form identifier naming changes to address the FSF concerns with how the GPL licenses are represented and deprecation of the prior GNU license identifiers will impact some projects.
You can always define your own, custom license if you want to. So using the "or later" licenses should just work fine for you already.
I think this issue deserves a high priority. A lot of developers that distributed their add-ons under:
GNU [L]GPL version x.x -- problaby wanted it to be distributed under: GNU [L]GPL version x.x or later.
Personally, I don't think so. Although the "or later" gives you the ability to receive minor version updates of the GPL it's still an implicit update of how your software is being distributed and many people don't like that. Same reason why you are actually pinning your software dependencies, implicit updates are always harder to control so defaulting to the pinned version sounds perfectly fine to me.
The "or later" addition is an option someone can actively choose which we already support. Making that process more complicated may not be in the interest of our developers.
Let's see what @jvillalobos thinks about that though.
Yeah, I don't see how it's useful to choose "2.0 or later" when we have 3.0 as an option, or "3.0 or later" when that's the latest version and there's little way to know what a 4.0 might be like. They're fine choices if the developers want to use them, and the savvier ones can use the "other" license option for that purpose.
But, for developers who are just signaling their add-on is open source, I think it's overkill to include the "or later" options on top of the existing ones.
@jvillalobos Did you read https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/rms-article-for-claritys-sake-please-dont-say-licensed-under-gnu-gpl-2 as suggested by Ian above?
I didn't. I understand this is important to people who care deeply about open source, but I agree with Chris that it's not the best way to go for our developers.
Describe the problem and steps to reproduce it:
Visited https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/addon/ENTRY/ownership
What happened?
I can choose one of the following licenses:
What did you expect to happen?
The "or later" options are relevant and have separate entries in the SPDX database (https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0-only.html and https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0-or-later.html).
Anything else we should know?