GPL v2 only,please

[David Kastrup]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

> Didier Verna writes:
>
>  > I've even asked Richard about this in person once and he couldn't
>  > give me any satisfactory answer.
>
> I'm surprised.  Do you find the above unsatisfactory?  If so, how?

I am not surprised.  You explained the reason why it may be the best
option for a large scale project with a considerable upstream code
base (c) FSF and like to follow the GPL license progression.

For a single-person or otherwise closed-circle project, not using the
"or at your option any later version" clause causes no immediate
problem: the person will always be able to actually change the license
whenever he consider a new license better.

For such a project, indeed I would be hard to come up with a good
reasoning.  The best is probably that it might keep others from using
and/or contributing, and that if anything happens to the author at one
time (he dies or gets fatally disinterested in any paperwork), his
project might increasingly get unused because of license
incompatibilities and because companies get better ideas about how to
endrun GPL versions from a later date.

I'd perfectly understand Steven Baur to express his dislike and
distrust of Stallman by not giving people the "or later" option for
private software of his, and that's probably similar to what Didier
had asked Richard Stallman about.

But for XEmacs, the consequences of such an individual action will
cause quite more problems for XEmacs than they ever could affect
Stallman.  It really reminded me of the "Life of Brian" motion
picture's entry of a "suicide commando" close to the end of the film.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum