Add new "versions" of the GPL and GNU licenses! 😈

[pombredanne]

Description

As reported by @armijnhemel the FSF has silently published new versions of the GPL 2.0, and likely other licenses, including backporting these modifications to old versions of the licenses 😈 because why would you need to respect the version number of legal document that demands to be reproduced verbatim?

The address is gone, so is Ty Coon:
See this diff https://gist.github.com/pombredanne/0916054e078a7bd033b04da84bb659eb/revisions

• https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html
• https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt (and previous https://web.archive.org/web/20240407010559/https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt )

And there are likely many other licenses also affected.

[mjherzog]

This is a job for SPDX. We should not work on this until we found what if anything the SPDX Legal group will do about this.

[DennisClark]

Totally agreed with @mjherzog on this one; this is a job for the SPDX Legal group.

[pombredanne]

@mjherzog @DennisClark we still need to add the new texts as rules for detection purpose

[DennisClark]

Interesting that the official FSF text (as we knew it anyway) included these bits:

"Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed."

"Each version is given a distinguishing version number."

I guess they did not read their own license when they started changing it without assigning a new version number.

[armijnhemel]

So has anyone informed the SPDX legal group? :)

--edit-- ah yes: spdx/license-list-XML#2568

[tieguy]

Interesting that the official FSF text (as we knew it anyway) included these bits:

"Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed."

"Each version is given a distinguishing version number."

I guess they did not read their own license when they started changing it without assigning a new version number.

Didn't know GitHub needs a sobbing emoji until now