Re: Evil fedora package & license issue

On 2012-07-30 15:13 +0200, Frank Fischer wrote:

> Evil now contains some code snippets stolen from other sources,
> usually from GNU Emacs itself (I know this because I've been the
> thief ;)). These files are usually distributed under GPLv3 whereas
> Evil still has GPLv2. For correctness we should therefore upgrade
> the licensing to GPLv3, too.

The following article from 2007 explains how and why one should
upgrade from GPLv2 to GPLv3:

    http://gplv3.fsf.org/rms-why.html

As I understand it, using GPLv3 code in a program means that the whole
code base must be upgraded to GPLv3:

    "When we say that GPLv2 and GPLv3 are incompatible, it means there
    is no legal way to combine code under GPLv2 with code under GPLv3
    in a single program. This is because both GPLv2 and GPLv3 are
    copyleft licenses: each of them says, 'If you include code under
    this license in a larger program, the larger program must be under
    this license too.' There is no way to make them compatible. We
    could add a GPLv2-compatibility clause to GPLv3, but it wouldn't
    do the job, because GPLv2 would need a similar clause."

However, this shouldn't pose any problems for packaging:

    "Fortunately, license incompatibility only matters when you want
    to link, merge or combine code from two different programs into a
    single program. There is no problem in having GPLv3-covered and