On Mon, 20 Aug 2001 18:10:29 +0200, joack said:
Does anybody know more about this? Does the "any" in the licenses really work the way Drepper claims?
Without the "or any later version" it would be highly problematic to change the license in case a bug has been identified in that license. This is what we call in software "easily extendible".
So from time to time there might be a need to change the licence; Think only about the changes we have encountered in the last years: Nobody thought about ASPs 10 years ago and now with our abundance of bandwidth, systems can be build which work around the protection given by the (L)GPL. For new software one would really like to be able to change a licencse. If there is code which just says "Version x.y" it will be impossible to build new software based on that code under a debugged license.
And Ulrich forgot to mention that the (L)GPL also says, that new revisions of the license will be in the same spirit.
I guess he had some bad days and didn't thought when he started that flamefest.
Werner