[Scummvm-devel] RFC: Transitioning to GPLv3

[Hein-Pieter van Braam-Stewart]

Hi all,

I'm not very active so I'm not going to weigh in on the matter of
whether or not to migrate to GPLv3. However, there's no actual need to
do so to be able to merge GPLv3 licensed code.

The situation would essentially be as follows:

* A binary built without any GPLv3 engines included would be licensed
under the GPLv2 (or at your option) GPLv3. The way this works is that
the person who *distributes* the engine gets to choose between the two
already.
* A binary built WITH a GPLv3 engine would be GPLv3 (or later). A
distributer of that binary does not get an option. Except to use a
potential future GPLv4 instead.

I hope that clears that up. As long as everything is licensed as 'or
later' this decision will never actually need to be made, legally
speaking.

- HP

On Mon, 2020-10-26 at 16:07 +0100, Einar Johan Trøan Sømåen via
Scummvm-devel wrote:
> Hi team
> 
> Recently the topic of which license to use has come up again. In
> particular whether or not we should be moving towards GPLv3. As far
> as I understand GPLv3 is compatible with the same licenses that GPLv2
> is, in terms of what code (and thus engines) we can integrate, but it
> is in addition compatible with GPLv3. 
> 
> https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility gives a
> quick idea of how that works out.
> 
> So the net gain for us, is that we would be able to integrate code
> that is itself licensed under GPLv3, one _potential_ example would be
> for instance the HPL engine:
> https://github.com/FrictionalGames/HPL1Engine
> 
> Technically we can perform this change because we are licensed under
> “GPLv2 (or later)”, which means that we can transition to v3 without
> having to seek new approval from all historical contributors. (The
> linux kernel is a counter example, where they lack the “or later”,
> and would thus need to seek explicit permission from all
> contributors, as the license they got the code under does not allow
> for upgrades).
> 
> Since this is a fairly large, and completely irreversible change, so
> we’d like to hear what the opinions are among the team, should we
> stay at v2, or move to v3?
> 
> Regards
> 
> The leadership team
> 
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