On Wednesday 08 August 2007 04:35:55 DJ Delorie wrote:
> > Regardless of all this, it is unclear to me whether or not
> > permission is needed from all the copyright owner's for such a change
> > (please don't answer this unless you have an _explicit_ statement from
> > the GPL or the FSF FAQ that isn't contradicted elsewhere).
>
> Well, IANAL but the Linux Kernel has stated that they *can't* change
> licenses, because it's practically impossible to contact all the
> contributors and get them to agree to change. That's why the FSF
> requires a copyright assignment for all contributions to their
> projects; no matter who works on it, the FSF *owns* it. Thus, they
> can change the license as needed.
>
> In the case of the kernel, it's GPL2 - not GPL2+ - so it cannot be
> distributed under the terms of GPL3 (except by coincidence).
>
> > Like PCB, gEDA/gaf has a diverse amount of copyright owners,
> > some of which have dropped off of the face of the 'net.
>
> If you don't have a copyright assignment for their contributions, they
> own them, not you. Sorry. This has nothing to do with the GPL and
> everything to do with US copyright law - they wrote it, they own it,
> unless it's a contracted work-for-hire or you make other legally
> binding arrangements.
If all of the contributors have said that "you may choose to license this work
under the GPL v2 or any later version", then you can do exactly that,
copyright assignment or not. They've already given you permission to
distribute it under the GPL v3 -- you don't need to get it explicitly (this
is rather the _point_ of the "any later version" clause)!
If and when Ales decides to move to distributing and maintaining gEDA/gaf
under the GPL v3, he can do exactly that.
Peter
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