From: Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@...>
Date: 2006-04-07T10:35:07+09:00
Subject: Re: GPL v3 and Ruby License.

On 4/6/06, Daniel Baird <danielbaird@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 07/04/06, Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > You absolutely, positively, can redistribute the software under a later
> > version.
> >
> >
> Hmm, I guess Bill Gates is right and GPL is aggresively viral after all :)
>
> It seems weird that if action A is allowable under GPL2 but not under GPL3,
> and I repackage Ruby source and release it under GPL3, people who get source
> from me can't do action A, but people who get source from the original
> location can.

But that's kind of the point of the whole thing.  You can see farther
up the thread where we mentioned the 'any later version' clause to be
a back door, which can be avoided by mentioning an explicit version
number.  But as Austin mentioned, it does swing both ways.

I'm personally going to avoid putting 'or any later version' in any of
my code, because I'm afraid that even if I'm down with GPLv3, which
for the most part I am... what's to say about GPLv4 or GPLv5?   Is my
code going to be under a wildly different license 10 years from now
(assuming with incredible ego that i'll have some project that spans
that time frame)?

I don't want to think about it... so dropping the 'any later version'
term from my license file will save thinking about it.