Re: [patch V2 02/11] LICENSES: Add the GPL 2.0 license

From: Alan Cox
Date: Mon Nov 20 2017 - 10:31:39 EST


On Sat, 18 Nov 2017 11:14:00 -0800
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> You may be confusing things because of a newer version.
>
> On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 11:03 AM, Charlemagne Lasse
> <charlemagnelasse@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > That should be "GNU Lesser General Public" and not "GNU Library General Public"
>
> That's just FSF revisionism.
>
> It used to be called "Library" over "Lesser", in the original GPL2.
>
> I suspect your other issues are similar "there's been different
> versions over time" things. the address being one of them.
>
> We've actually taken some of the FSF updates over the years ("19yy" ->
> "<year>", and the address change) but the main COPYING file still
> calls the LGPL the "GNU Library General Public License".
>
> I refuse to change the original copyright wording due to idiotic
> internal FSF politics that tried to change history.

Do we have any files which had the later LGPL text attached to them - if
so then they should be keeping that header.

Which raises another question. If there are multiple GPL 2.0 texts which
are *supposedly* legally identical but this has never been tested in law
-that implies SPDX is wrong in tagging them identically in case they turn
out not to be...

Alan