Re: Relicensing Nautilus to GPLv3+

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Thu, 2017-05-18 at 13:50 -0400, Carlos Soriano via desktop-devel-
list wrote:
> Wouldn't that make the actual extension GPL2-but-not-GPL3 comaptible
> since the start, and therefore cannot be GPL2+ project and therefore
> its License file would need to reflect that?

No. nautilus' license says "GPLv2 or later". The extension's license
says "GPLv2 only".

When you combine both licenses into the final product/memory address
space (the "linking" mentioned in the GPL license) you end up with a
"combined work" license of GPLv2.

So it was compatible, but wouldn't be any more.

As mentioned on IRC, I think that the original intent of using the LGPL
for the libnautilus-extensions library was to allow non-GPL-compatible
extensions to link into nautilus, at will. It's not like you could link
to the extensions library without also eventually linking to nautilus
itself...

If that were the case, and that might require some digging to talk to
the original authors, then you might be able to mention this in the
extensions document that was recently (and erroneously) removed.

HTH