[josm-dev] License clarification for JOSM plugins

[Lauri Hahne]

I'm not a developer of JOSM but I think you're on very thin ice trying
to distribute JOSM under GPL3 or later. This is because currently most
(if not all) source files tell that the license is just GPL which is
very vague. In addition, the LICENSE file only has GPL2. Nowhere does
it currently state "v2 or later" which would be required to distribute
it under v3.

I don't know whether this is intentional or not, but currently JOSM
looks like GPL v2 only.

On 14/04/2008, Giovanni Mascellani <g.mascellani at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all!
>
>  It's the first time I'm writing here, so let me present quickly myself:
>  I'm Giovanni Mascellani, a student in Pisa, Italy, and I'm working
>  together with Andreas Putzo and Petter Reinholdsten on a Debian package
>  for josm and its plugins.
>
>  As we are distributing our packages under the GPL-3 (or later) license,
>  we'd need to make sure that we have legal rights to do so. Anyway,
>  plugins validator and ywms from the SVN repository
>  http://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/editors/josm/plugins/ contain
>  the text of the GPL-2 without any further information. Should this be
>  understood as a GPL-2 only licensing or as a GPL-2 or later? Could you
>  please add a note that clarifies this on the SVN? (Debian is very picky
>  about having a perfectly legally-clean archive!)
>
>  Thank you for your work on JOSM, and have a nice mapping!
>
>  Regards, Giovanni.
>  --
>  Giovanni Mascellani <g.mascellani at gmail.com>
>  Pisa, Italy
>
>  Web: http://giomasce.altervista.org
>  SIP: g.mascellani at ekiga.net
>  Jabber: g.mascellani at jabber.org / giovanni at elabor.homelinux.org
>  GPG: 0x5F1FBF70 (FP: 1EB6 3D43 E201 4DDF 67BD  003F FCB0 BB5C 5F1F BF70)
>
>
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>


-- 
Lauri Hahne