Re: [Qemu-devel] [patch] s390-dis.c license

["Bill C. Riemers" <docbill@gmail.com>]

According to section 9 of the GPL, you would only have to contact
contributors for code which specified version 2 of the GPL and not later...

e.g.

 *  Copyright (c) 2003-2005 Fabrice Bellard
 *
 * This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
 * modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public
 * License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
 * version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

The any later version means you can replace the GPL 2 license with GPL
3, without contacting the author.  This is explicitly spelled out by
section 9 of the GPL.  The reason why some software projects can not
automatically update to GPL 3, is some authors deliberately remove the
", or (at your option) any later version." clause.

Bill


M. Warner Losh wrote:
> In message: <8a6cde920801171244k35d84ec9vf82277d2e5090a4f@mail.gmail.com>
>             "Ricardo Almeida" <ric.almeida@gmail.com> writes:
> : > The problem is: you would have to ask every contributor whose code is
> : > still somewhere in the source code.  That is tedious, and takes time (I do
> : > not even think that an email would suffice).
> : 
> : >From what I read once in a slashdot post (it's worth what is worth),
> : it suffices a public announcement of the change and a deadline
> : (something around 60 to 90 days). The announce could be in QEmu
> : homepage and on this list...
>
> That's not legally correct.  To change a license in a way not
> permitted by the original license holder, you *MUST* have *EXPLICIT*
> approval to do that.  Otherwise, licenses would be meaningless...
>
> Warner
>
>
>