Re: GDB 6.8 - license terms

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 04:03:46PM +0200, Volkmann, Patrick wrote:
> Hi,
>  
> i would appreciate your help with the following issue:
>  
> The file "README" in the GDB 6.8 root contains the following phrase (line 42):
> "...See the file COPYING or
> COPYING.LIB in the various directories, for a description of the
> GNU General Public License terms under which you can copy the files..."
>  
> Now we detected in the source code GPL v2 and GPL v3 license terms 
> (e.g in the root, \gdb-6.8\COPYING and \gdb-6.8\COPYING3)
>  
> But some subfolders only contain the GPL v2 license 
> (e.g. \gdb-6.8\bfd\COPYING, \gdb-6.8\gdb\COPYING, ... )
>  
> Because of the incompatibility between GPLv3 and GPLv2, 
> we are not sure if we can consider the whole component as licensed under the terms of GPL v3.
>  
> Can you please help me with this issue?

Most FSF-owned code is licensed under the "GPL v2 or later" or "GPL v3
or later".  When you mix those two, you must handle the result under
GPL v3 (or a later version as released by the FSF in the future).

It's not the COPYING files that are important, in any case, but the
notices on the individual sources.  GDB moved to GPLv3 around
2007-08-23, which was before the release of GDB 6.8.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery