[sword-devel] Script to find a best fit v11n

[Greg Hellings]

On Sun, Jun 29, 2025, 8:56 PM Matěj Cepl <mcepl at cepl.eu> wrote:

> On Mon Jun 30, 2025 at 2:05 AM CEST, Greg Hellings wrote:
> > I was about to publish it and produce binaries, but I ran into a problem:
> > I used Slint to create the UI, and Slint is licensed for either
> commercial
> > or GPLv3
> > SWORD is licensed as GPLv2
>
> Isn’t GPLv3 downward compatible? I.e., you can use GPLv2 inside
> of GPLv3 project, but not the other way around? That would work for you.
>

No. GPLv3 introduces additional restrictions not present in v2 (the most
often talked about additional restriction attempts to prevent
"tivoisation"). But one of the clauses of v2 says you cannot add any new
restrictions to the code distribution. So you cannot unilaterally take
GPLv2 code into a GPLv3 codebase. Doing so requires the permission of the
original distributor to distribute the code under a non-GPLv2 license.

The FSF strongly suggests people with GPLv2 code include in the license
language the option for users to use any later version of GPL. This is
sometimes denoted as "GPLv2+". Thus, a huge percentage of GPLv2 code is
also available under v3, thus addressing the concern about multiple
licenses for the code from the start. However, not all projects choose to
do so. SWORD is one of those - it is licensed as GPLv2 only. (Notably the
Linux kernel also is GPLv2 only, as well, so it's definitely not a niche
licensing pattern, although it is a minority one.)

--Greg

>
> Best,
>
> Matěj
>
> --
> http://matej.ceplovi.cz/blog/, @mcepl at en.osm.town
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>  -- from a bugzilla quip list
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