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Comment by Macha | Hacker News Reader

Given they use GPL-x-or-later licenses and are all the authority needed to designate something as GPL 4 or 3.1 or whatever, if they wanted to go evil to utilise their control they already could have.

It's not like they're opposed on principal to new license versions to benefit specific projects either, e.g. GFDL 1.3 has the "Wikipedia can relicense to Creative Commons" exception

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The key difference to me is the “or later” part. So even if the FSF releases an evil version 3.1 or whatever, everyone could just continue to use version 3 instead. Whereas if the FSF owns all of the intellectual property, they can relicense it in its entirety to strictly 3.1.

I think you're on the right track, they just view protecting the FSF as something that needs to happen regardless, and it can therefore be relied on. Then if there's a horrible flaw with a previous GPL, they can at least force their projects to the new version.

I don't understand why your original comment was flagged. I went and watched one of the Q&A videos from Linus Torvalds you mentioned and it was very educational. Thanks for your comment, even though the HN comment cancellers hated it.

If the evil version 3.1 is more restrictive than previous versions, then you are right to say people could just ignore it. However, if evil version 3.1 is more permissive, for an extreme example say they changed it to a verbatim copy of WTFPL, then there would be nothing stopping people from creating a proprietary fork of the project, the very thing copyleft was designed to prevent.

Would they be in breach of contract if they did so, or would some other legal recourse exist?

The licence explicitly says: "The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the GNU General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns."

A non-copyleft licence would not be similar in spirit.

I could certainly imagine some proprietary code loving coalition seeking to control the FSF after RMS's eventual demise, so that they could create a new, non-copyleft licence.

GPL 3 is aware of such concern: it says, "If the Program specifies that a proxy can decide which future versions of the GNU General Public License can be used, that proxy's public statement of acceptance of a version permanently authorizes you to choose that version for the Program", apparently trying to provide an alternative path to allow Linus Torvalds to accept only the versions he wants to accept.

There's nothing stopping the next release of an application that has historically been GPL 2 or later being released as GPL 3.1 only, however? They can't go back and take back the existing licenses to existing versions (the whole non-revocable term of the license) so other users can still give you those versions under those licenses even if the FSF decided they didn't want to themselves.

The following is crafted deliberately as something of a worst case scenario; I don't think it is even remotely likely.

So GCC is 3.1 or later. RMS dies and Google, Facebook etc get in control of the FSF: after all, they are major contributors and beneficiaries. While this is going down, fearing the badness around the corner, the GCC project continues work on GCC under 3.1 only (and attempts to stop it, unsuccessfully). The FSF releases 4.0 which is a long and wordy version of 3 clause BSD.

Google now forks the latest version of GCC before the project relicensed it. There are two versions continuing: Google GCC under GPL4+ and GCC GCC under GPL3.1. The community doesn't entirely know which branch to contribute to and amidst the mire all the new features of C++30 get added to a proprietary fork of Clang. In general, free software gets regarded as dusty and old and most development happens on compilers people bought.

No need for that.

https://github.com/android/ndk/wiki/Changelog-r18

https://fuchsia.dev/

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