Comment Re:Unfortunately? (Score 2, Insightful) 82
How does the "or later" clause hinder use? Licensing under GPLv3 might have (I'm not going to argue that either way), but what does the "or later" clause matter?
Because you cannot mix v2-only code with v3/v3+ code. It's actually incompatible - v3 puts additional "restrictions" (from v2's perspective) on the code, making it incompatible (e.g., anti-TiVoization, etc).
So this means all code in that kernel must be either v2 or v2+ (which means the "+" disappears).
For an embedded systems, they typically want GPLv2 or v2+, avoiding v3 as much as possible. "or later" can hinder since if you're not careful, you might accidentally include v3 code (especially if you pull from an upstream source) when you don't want to. v2-only makes that a license violation, while v2+ turns into v3/v3+. One should be careful when pulling patches to make sure the codebase doesn't unexpectedly turn into v3.