[Pkg-alsa-devel] GPL version option for echomixer.c?

[Thomas Hood]

Dear Mr. Pochini,

Because a draft version of GPL version 3 has been published I decided to examine
the licenses of software that I have been involved in packaging for Debian.

In the alsa-tools tarball distributed by the ALSA project

    alsa-tools_1.0.10+1.0.11rc2.orig.tar.gz

there are several programs licensed under the GPL.  An arbitrarily chosen example:

 *  ac3dec is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
 *  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
 *  the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
 *  any later version.

Notice that the user is given the option of redistributing under versions of the
GPL later than version 2.

One of the programs differs from the others and that is the file echomixer.c,
wherein you are listed as the author:

 *  ALSA mixer console for Echoaudio soundcards.
 *  Copyright (C) 2003 Giuliano Pochini <pochini at shiny.it>
 *
 *  This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
 *  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
 *  the Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the License.

I fully respect the author's right to choose the terms of his license.  However,
it is possible that you didn't intend to withhold the option that other authors
granted to recipients of their programs.  So I thought I would ask.  Are you
willing to give recipients the option to use a later version of the GPL or did
you intentionally refrain from granting that option?

(Obviously it simplifies our packaging task a bit if all programs in the package
fall under exactly the same license.)
-- 
Thomas Hood
Debian ALSA packaging team