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0 pointsstefantalpalaru11y ago0 comments

The way you protect yourself from unknown future licenses is to license the project under GPLv2 but require all contributions to be GPLv2+. When you read and agree to the next version, then you can add it to the project or switch to it completely.

This scheme depends on one (main) developer having control over the licensing of a significant part of the code base so it's subject to the "hit by a bus" failure mode.

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0x011y ago· 1 in thread

Is that even possible; how can contributors legally provide patches under a license that is different from the source they are patching? How do you know if there is any "GPLv2 only" code left in the project? Do you track license usage by the code line? Can you add a trailing space to every single line of the code and release it on github as "GPLv2 and later" (hey, it's a patch), thus getting rid of the whole "GPLv2 only" clause?

stefantalpalaruOP11y ago

> Can you add a trailing space to every single line of the code and release it on github as "GPLv2 and later" (hey, it's a patch), thus getting rid of the whole "GPLv2 only" clause?

No, a patch that doesn't completely replace existing code can not alter it's copyright. As long as you can insure that your GPLv2 code is in the project and not easily replaced, you control the project's license.

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