When to evaluate dual licenses

[Chris Travers]

Just as clarification, I have always seen "GPL v2 or at your option any
later version" as simply meaning that if anyone wants to they can upgrade.
The idea is to prevent projects from having to get either copyright
assignment from every major contributor or otherwise show that they are not
infringing on other people's work by getting permission in advance to
upgrade the license.  This is then passed downstream to recipients in
essentially a symmetric agreement.

This means that the the upgrade clause is a part of the license.  If the
immediate recipient is forced to remove part of the permissions from the
license and choose one of these, then that would defeat the purpose of
having the upgrade clause at all and turn the license into something very
non-open source.  In this case, it would make forking nearly impossible
because derivative works could not provide all the same permissions
downstream as they received.  Hence my comment-- if this is the meaning, and
everyone agrees with it, then we need a note on the GPL page which states
that the use of the upgrade clause violates the OSD.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
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