TYPO3 Core

There a legal opinions that gplv2 would allow us that too.

http://www.rosenlaw.com/GPLv3-Comments.htm

Quoting: "I have long counseled that GPLv2 allowed that result also, but some argued otherwise. All the FUD that I and others have spread over the years about linking—static, dynamic, otherwise—didn’t help matters much. This argument can be replaced now by intelligent conversation about the actual words of GPLv3, which I understand to allow aggregations of verbatim copies of independently-written modules taken from the worldwide portfolio of free and open source software. I have always read the Open Source Definition as mandating that open source licenses permit the copying and distribution of verbatim copies including for collective works, and this added clarity in GPLv3 supports that interpretation. Perhaps now our software commons is vastly larger for collecting independent open source modules into interoperating solutions for our customers.

Of course this all remains, despite the increased clarity of GPLv3, a complex legal topic requiring careful counsel: From a copyright law perspective, the original licenses continue to apply to those verbatim copies, but not necessarily to the collective work as a whole. Collective works are independently copyrightable to the extent they required creativity to collect. Also under copyright law, don’t confuse collective works with derivative works. The improved clarity of the definitions in GPLv3 Section 0 may help explain these concepts to developers and distributors of software, for which I thank the authors of the license. But you should still consult with your own attorneys to ensure that you clearly understand the legal distinctions I’m drawing here."

Let us raise the issue with the TYPO3 Associations Legal Consellours if we can move to gplv3 given the fact that we have this in the License.txt but still use the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, June 1991 in GPL.txt. Or if we need to ask contributors about this?

Who can research when License.txt was added/changed?

Olivier

The original LICENSE.TXT was added by Kasper himself and just referred to GPL without naming any specific version.
According to the git history it has been added 27.10.03

The specific version and the term "or later" has been added by Dmitry Dulepov 23.07.08
The version in the GPL.TXT, the LICENSE.TXT files are referring to, always has been GPLv2

So we could argue LICENSE.TXT always was meant this way but just poorly written, since otherwise Kasper would not have accepted Dmitry's change.

So according to this matrix http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#compat-matrix-footnote-3 we should be allowed to convert the license to GPLv3, since this still would be compliant to "GPLv2 or later".

The important part can be found in footnote 3 itself, which says:

3: If you have the ability to release the project under GPLv2 or any later version, 
you can choose to release it under GPLv3 or any later version—and once you do that, 
you'll be able to incorporate the code released under GPLv3.

Following the discussion (RFC # 9017) around this particular change by Dmitry, you can find this:

Problem: LICENSE.txt does not mention that TYPO3 is released under "GPL version 2 *or later*". 
This is extremely important because GPL version 3 code cannot be combined with GPL version 2 code unless "version 2 or later" is declared. 
Our source code says "version 2 or later" but LICENSE.txt does not. 
Since LICENSE.txt is the obvious candidate to check the license, it should be precise. 

And this is the part of any TYPO3 related code mentioned in that description:

*  This script is part of the TYPO3 project. The TYPO3 project is
*  free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
*  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
*  the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
*  (at your option) any later version.

So actually the code always has been published with the term "or any later version", but just the LICENSE.TXT file was unprecise, so we are definitely on the safe side.

There's another issue I have found, that IMHO forces us to move to GPLv3 anyway, since there is already code using LGPLv3 provided by extbase.
LPGLv3 code is incompatible with GPLv2, so unless these parts of extbase are just considered to be a part of a "collection" of code with different licenses, we either have to remove it, or shift the whole project to GPLv3.

+1 to Jo, moving to GPLv3 is allowed by the "any later version". We should keep this for GPLv3 too.

Moving to GPLv3 would solve lots of issues with the current external code included into our repository: GPLv3, LGPLv3, Apache v2, ...

Please note that GPLv2 and GPLv3 are mutually exclusive as both are copyleft licences.
We also might want to consider to include all Licenses information of external code into the LICENSE.txt file. This will make it much easier to solid decisions for the distribution of the software (e.g. with debian).

Joey told me in the CON that we don't need to upgrade the license to "GPLv3 or later" in order to include Apache2 licensed stuff (i.e. Twitter Bootstrap). Kay (Strobach) confirmed that. But I was wondering if this is correct and based on which "evidence"? My impression was that as soon as we do so, we need to release the next version as a "GPLv3 or later".

And upgrading the core's license to GPLv3 (or later) will most probably require that all extensions that are in TER and "in the wild" also upgrade their own licenses to be compatible with this latest TYPO3 release, we should not forget that.

As for the extbase code, since all this is covered by a CLA, the T3A could simply grant the TYPO3 CMS Core an exception to include that in our GPLv2 product.

BTW Twitter Bootstrap will be moving to MIT license for "new contributions" and is in contact with all past contributors to get the whole package MIT licensed in future. Cool stuff. :)

See http://blog.getbootstrap.com/2013/10/29/bootstrap-3-0-1-released/ section "Moving to MIT license"

I don't think that the extensions need to update their own license.

But can we get this clarified for TYPO3 6.2? Maybe from the TYPO3 Association?

What's the state of this issue?

ping
What is the state of this issue?