Subject: [FFC-dev] License upgrade

From: Anders Logg <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 23:24:37 +0200

I would like to upgrade the license of FFC to GPL v3.

I found the following list of contributors:

     Johan Jansson
     Robert C. Kirby
     Matthew G. Knepley
     Dag Lindbo
     Kristian Oelgaard
     Marie Rognes
     Ola Skavhaug
     Andy R. Terrel
     Garth N. Wells

I need confirmation from everyone on this list that changing the license 
is ok. (And please tell me if someone is missing.)

There is much to read about GPL v3, see for example

     http://gplv3.fsf.org/
     http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

I read it and I think it looks good.

I also would like to change the wording of the per-file license statement to

     GNU GPL Version 3 or later

and the global license statement to

     This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
     it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
     the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
     (at your option) any later version.

In principle, it may be dangerous giving a third party free hands to 
decide on a future license without us looking at it first. But I'm not 
so worried about that, and if FSF publish GPL v4 in 10 years and it's 
very bad, then we may just say GPL v3 only for any future releases of FFC...

/Anders

---

From: Anders Logg <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2007 09:19:05 +0200

> Anders, can you summarize the differences between v2 and v3?

Basically, it's the same license as before (modified distributed 
versions also need to be free and GPL). But two things have been added:

1. If you put GPL software in a consumer product (like a TiVo) then a 
user must be able to modify the software (when that is possible, if it's 
burnt in ROM it's not possible). So you can't disallow changes to the 
software by shutting down if a checksum has changed for example.

2. If you give a patent license (I won't sue you for using this patent) 
to a group of users as part of distributing GPL software, then you must 
give the patent license to everyone that receives the software. (So you 
can't make an exclusive patent deal like MS and Novell did.)

Other than that, there are some legalese improvements in the text and 
internationalization.

/Anders

> On 7/23/07, *Anders Logg* <[email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
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