Licence Confusion GPL-2 vs GPL-2+

[paddatrapper]

I'm confused at which licence this project is licensed under. The README and metadata files say GPL-2+, however the headers, when included in source files (for example src/*) read GPL-2 only.

I am looking at packaging this for Debian and I'm leaning towards documenting the entire project as GPL-2 only, as the GPL-2 only code cannot be licensed under a later version. Trying to release this under a GPL-3 licence for example would require re-licensing those files anyway.

[SpotlightKid]

Sorry for the somewhat late answer, but maybe this explanation will help:

The origins of jack_mixer precede the creation of the GPL3. As such, the C source files and the README only said "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" resp. "licensed under GPL version 2".

In Dec 2009 (GPL3 released mid-2007) the README* was updated to say "licensed under GPL version 2 (or later)":

8390605

The change was done by Frederic Peters, who took over maintainance of the project of Nedko Arnaudov, who was, up until that point, the sole author of jack_mixer, so I assume it was no problem for him to change the license of the whole project to include the "(or later)" extension.

The license text in the C source and other files were not updated at that point or later, but the wording of the README, IMHO, makes it possible to infer that "It is licensed under GPL version 2 (or later)" extends to the whole project ("It" referring to "jack_mixer" in the paragraph above).

I hope that clears things up, if you have further questions, please don't hesitate to ask.

* The file README was later renamed to README.md by me.

Update: corrected paragraph about the author of the README change.

[paddatrapper]

Ok. For the moment, I have uploaded a package with GPL-2 because the Debian FTP masters are very conservative around licencing. If you do update the licence headers in the source files, I can update the Debian package. Though it isn't a big issue