Re: Switching GAS to GPLv3

[Ralf Corsepius <ralf.corsepius@rtems.org>]

On Wed, 2007-07-11 at 15:11 +0100, Nick Clifton wrote:
> Hi Jakub,
> 
> > What does this mean for backporting fixes from binutils trunk to older
> > binutils releases?
> > Does this mean backports are not possible at all, or do we have to
> > relicense our legacy releases (that we want to backport stuff to) to GPLv3?
> 
> I have received this reply from the FSF:
> 
> : Since the previous releases were licensed under GPLv2 or later, all
> : maintainers need to do is upgrade their backport to GPLv3 or later -- then
> : they'll be able to incorporate patches that were never released under
> : GPLv2.
> :
> : If there's enough demand for this, you may be able to make life easier for
> : those maintainers, if you want, by providing patches that upgrade the
> : license on binutils from "GPLv2 or later" to "GPLv3 or later."  Hopefully
> : those would be easy to generate after you did this upgrade for the code
> : yourself, and each maintainer wouldn't have to do the work themselves.
> : After you published them, backport maintainers could apply them to their
> : own backports, and then also go ahead to incorporate later patches that
> : were released under GPLv3 or later.
> 
> So the answer appears to be that in order to apply patches made to GPLv3 
> sources to previous releases we have to change the affected files over 
> to the GPLv3 as well.

In my understanding everybody who submits patches to binutils must have
a copyright assignment to the FSF on file (unless patches are considered
trivial).

I am I wrong in presuming that a patch contributed under a copyright
assignment can be implied to cover GPLv2 and GPLv3? 

In other words, if I's submit a patch against a GPLv3'd version of a
package I'd implicitly assume my patch also to be applicable to a
GPLv2'd version of the package.

Ralf