updating the GPL's status in http://www.opensource.org/licenses/category ?

[Luis Villa]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 11:11 AM, Chris Travers <chris at metatrontech.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 6:15 PM, Luis Villa <luis at tieguy.org> wrote:
>> While working on my last email, I noticed that
>> http://www.opensource.org/licenses/category lists GPL/LGPL 3 as
>> 'uncategorized', and superseded licenses does not include GPL/LGPL v2.
>> Given that Black Duck says that GPL3 is now the fifth most popular
>> license[1], surpassing several of the licenses in the 'popular or
>> widely used' category, and that its maintainer considers it
>> superseded, it seems like it is probably time to go ahead and move v3
>> to 'popular/widely used' and v2 to 'superseded' (especially if someone
>> is editing the list to deal with my other email.)
>
> The issue is that the GPL v 2 is still popular among many developers
> who either feel they don't understand the GPL v3, who don't feel their
> projects can meet some of the new criteria in the GPL v3,  or who
> disagree with RMS on some points.
>
> These licenses are really different licenses and have different
> ramifications for projects.  Linus Torvalds, for example, has released
> the Linux kernel under the GPL v2 (only) because of ideological
> differences with RMS.  LedgerSMB made a decision to stay with GPl v2
> or later because, while we comply with the GPL v2, we do not presently
> comply with the GPL v3.
>
> Also I would not consider a license used by nearly half of open source
> projects according to your own source to be "superseded."

When I wrote the email, OSI's website was down, so I couldn't check
how OSI had defined 'superseded' in the past. I expected 'superseded'
to be defined something like 'the license's sponsor has announced a
new version', since that is what happened with many (most?) of the
other licenses which I knew were in that group: Moz 1.0, Apache 1.1.,
etc. (Apache 1.1 in particular is still used

Now that the website is back up, I see that the definition of a
superseded license is:

           Superseded licenses: Licenses in this category have been
superseded by newer versions.

Which, well, isn't terribly clarifying, but certainly isn't what I
expected it to be. If the license sponsor's intent and release of a
new version isn't the key determinant, then obviously v2 hasn't been
superseded, and the request should be ignored. But it might be nice
for OSI to refine that definition for future reference.

Luis