When to evaluate dual licenses

[Smith, McCoy]

Where is recipient being "forced" to do anything?
 
And if your analysis is correct, wouldn't someone who wants to upgrade
be required to continue to allow his/her recipients to choose the
downgraded license?  I.e., Alice gives under "v2 or later," Bob (who
could be the maintainer) wants to upgrade to v3, but if he can't remove
the "v2 permission" then he has to offer to Carol under -- let's see --
"v2 or v3 or later"?

________________________________

From: Chris Travers [mailto:chris.travers at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2007 5:16 PM
To: License Discuss
Subject: Re: When to evaluate dual licenses


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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