License Framework: Develop Best Practices

[Eric]

> From: "Philip M. Gollucci" <pgollucci at p6m7g8.com>
> Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2010 02:03:08 +0000
> 
> On 06/15/10 00:46, Marco Bröder wrote:
>> I find it especially important to have a expression for 'version X or any
>> later version' (for example 'LGPLv2+'), since the following dummy example is
>> not adequate:
> A very good idea, but not neccessarily the best one.  Future versions of
> licenses are not always backwards compatible?  Its GPLv2 vs GPLv3 one
> such example ?

Although does it matter in those cases about backwards compatibility?  If
the software has been released under (for example) "GPLv2 or higher" then
hasn't the author essentially already consented to any future version of the
GPL, no matter how incompatible they may be?

If however they re-release software under later licences (dual or otherwise)
then that's explicit and the licence entry would either be the new licence
or a combination of the new and old entries.

It would seem from reading the various posting that the two missing features
are some sort of clean way of saying "this license or higher" and possibly
something along the lines of "like this licence" for cases where 99% is the
same as an existing OS licence, but I guess that last one comes down to a
point of purpose.  Is the licence framework supposed to be a solid legal
structure or is it much like the pkg-descriptions just something we can
filter against and use to help guide us to the ports we want to install?