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"GPL v3 tries to close some loopholes in GPL v2." And what, in plain English, would those loopholes be?
by delinka 13y ago
"GPL v3 tries to close some loopholes in GPL v2." And what, in plain English, would those loopholes be?
- belorn 13y agoGPLv2 says: "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.". GPLv3 explicit says: "not allow patents to restrict development and use of software" GPLv3 also say that you can not use hardware restrictions as a trick to circumventing the no-further-restrictions legal requirement. One could argue that GPLv2 already include everything GPLv3 do in form of that single line. Doing such interpretation would for all practical purposes upgrade every gplv2-only project to the same conditions as of GPLv3 (but with fewer license compatibilities). The FSF clearly decided not to go that route, and created the GPLv3.
- chimeracoder 13y agoThe GPLv3 served two main purposes: 1) Prevent Tivoization[0]. As noted below, it could be argued that the GPLv2 already forbade this, but that is left up to legal interpretation (which did not always agree in practice). So they made this explicit in the GPLv3. 2) Allow interoperability between the different "flavors" of the GPL. The GPL comes in three "flavors" - regular, lesser, and Affero. Under v2, projects using the regular GPL could not be combined with projects using the Affero GPL. Under v3, all three of these can be safely mixed. (Essentially, for v3, each of the "flavors" includes an explicit exception for the other two, if I remember correctly). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization