Mir Relicensed To GPLv2 Or GPLv3

While we await the Mir 1.0 release with its new target of supporting Wayland clients directly, we noticed there was a re-licensing change this week for the Mir code-base.

Previously the Mir code was licensed under the GPLv3 for the Mir server and LGPLv3 for the client code. The license has now been updated to reflect GPLv2 or GPLv3 for the Mir server code and LGPLv2 or LGPLv3 for the Mir client code.

The motivation by the Canonical developers to support v2 wasn't disclosed in the commit, while there could be several reasons from better compatibility with GPLv2-only software to avoiding the explicit patent license of the GPLv3 and other legal additions imposed by the v3 of the licenses.

The re-licensing was in Bazaar revision 4219 of Mir this week. The latest Mir commits can be seen here, which is much less frequent than before considering Canonical let go of several Mir developers and have shifted their focus away from Unity 8 + Mir onto GNOME + Wayland while still working on Mir for select use-cases.