Getting grubby with ZFS

Posted Dec 8, 2010 9:16 UTC (Wed) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935)
In reply to: Getting grubby with ZFS by JoeBuck
Parent article: Getting grubby with ZFS

"or later" licensing can only add permissions to downstream users or developers: anything GPLv2 permits but GPLv3 forbids is permitted by a GPLv2-or-later license and vice versa.

IANAL, but it is not at clear to me that this is the case when you create derivative works by mixing GPLv2+ and GPLv3 code. What you say is certainly true if you separate again the GPLv2+ parts and distribute them only, but I'm not sure about what happens when you distribute the two parts together.

Getting grubby with ZFS

Posted Dec 10, 2010 8:09 UTC (Fri) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link]

The only legal way to combine GPL 2+ code with GPL3 code is to distribute under the GPL3. So, the entire derived work would have to be GPL3 licensed.

This is the license that your new derived work would be distributed under. However, this does not somehow force the party that distributed the GPL 2+ code to begin with to switch to GPL3 themselves.