[Fedora-legal-list] Including gpl3 code and how that affects other source in project

[Tom Callaway]

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On 05/28/2014 12:22 PM, Tim Flink wrote:
> I'm working on a project that's currently gpl2+ licensed [1] and
> we want to include some code from a gpl3 project [2]. This code
> will be an isolated utility used to generate documentation from
> data contained in other source files.
> 
> [1] https://bitbucket.org/fedoraqa/libtaskotron [2]
> https://github.com/ansible/ansible
> 
> I know that if we went forward with this, the project would need to
> be distributed as gpl3 but I have some questions around the
> specifics:
> 
> Would all the source in our project need to be re-licensed as gpl3
> or is it sufficient to have the project license as gpl3 and the
> existing source files as gpl2+?
> 
> Assuming that it is possible to keep the existing gpl2+ source as 
> gpl2+, would it be possible to change the project license back to
> gpl2+ in the future if we were to remove any gpl3 code?

== DISCLAIMER ==
IANAL, this is not legal advice.
== /DISCLAIMER ==

You would not need to re-license existing source from GPLv2+. The
effective license on the compiled binary works would be GPLv3 in the
scenario you describe. If you removed the GPLv3 code (or the code was
relicensed to GPLv2+), then the resulting binary license would be
GPLv2+. By adding the GPLv3 code, you're just forcing the "+" to
trigger to GPLv3 in the combined binary work. The individual source
files are still a mix.

~tom

==
¸.·´¯`·.´¯`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸><(((º> OSAS @ Red Hat
University Outreach || Fedora Special Projects || Fedora Legal
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