Re: Switching GAS to GPLv3

[Nick Clifton <nickc at redhat dot com>]

Hi Jakub,

> What does this mean for backporting fixes from binutils trunk to older
> binutils releases?
> Does this mean backports are not possible at all, or do we have to
> relicense our legacy releases (that we want to backport stuff to) to GPLv3?

I have received this reply from the FSF:

: Since the previous releases were licensed under GPLv2 or later, all
: maintainers need to do is upgrade their backport to GPLv3 or later -- then
: they'll be able to incorporate patches that were never released under
: GPLv2.
:
: If there's enough demand for this, you may be able to make life easier for
: those maintainers, if you want, by providing patches that upgrade the
: license on binutils from "GPLv2 or later" to "GPLv3 or later."  Hopefully
: those would be easy to generate after you did this upgrade for the code
: yourself, and each maintainer wouldn't have to do the work themselves.
: After you published them, backport maintainers could apply them to their
: own backports, and then also go ahead to incorporate later patches that
: were released under GPLv3 or later.

So the answer appears to be that in order to apply patches made to GPLv3 
sources to previous releases we have to change the affected files over 
to the GPLv3 as well.

Cheers
  Nick