Hello,

i'd like to use some parts of XOOPS in a project of mine. This is an open source project under GPL. XOOPS is GPL as well, however i found this in the header of the XOOPS souce files:

"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; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version."

Now the bold part gives me a few headaches. My project is strictly GPL v2 only whereas XOOPS can be either GPL v2 or v3. If I use XOOPS Source in my application, will that mean that my whole application needs to offer the user the option to use GPL v3 as well? Or would that only apply to the parts i've taken from XOOPS Source Code?

It'd only apply to the parts of the XOOPS source code you've used, AND if the XOOPS developers chose to release that code under the terms of the GPL v3. The developers are free to do so, but will have to do so explicitly.

Herko

The second part of your statement is not exactly right from my understanding of the license: Someone can take the source code, change it, and release his changes under GPLv3 only, because that is exactly what the boilerplate text allows you: "at your option, use a newer version of GPL"

I was worried that if that applies to my code that someone releases my code under GPL v3 only like it can be done with XOOPS Code.

If that license only applies to XOOPS Code that i modify i am fine with it - the XOOPS Guys have chosen to allow this for their code and all modifications made to it, i just don't want to allow this for my code.