[latchkeyed]

I guess I'm not worried because I don't see those sorts of disputes happening. The more common situation I see is projects that start with too little license flexibility, having chosen something like the artistic license, and then end up going through difficult relicensing processes to track down inactive committers etc when the community decides that they want to pull in code under GPL or some other license. So the fact that the "or later" option exists, or that the section 7 provisions allow me to pull in code from Apache 2.0, make me feel like I'll have less trouble down the road if other people join the project.

But you're not.

There are three codebases in question here. Code A is the original code, under bare GPL3. Code B is a derivative work of Code A, under GPL3+requiring modified versions being marked as different, and it may have the same name as Code A. Code C is a derivative work of Code B, and *must* be marked as different from Code B, because the author of Code C does not have any rights to the the code contributed by the author of Code B just because he happens to be the author of Code A, and although the clause can be added in a derivative work, it cannot be removed.

What I meant by "original code base" might be clearer if I use an example. Here's a scenario: I put out MySQL under v3 and someone comes along, patches it, and releases the new version under v3 with a 7(c) exception.

Now, even if I take your patches and reincorporate them into the main MySQL, I don't think you'll be able to use section 7 to make me change the project name. If you look at the text in section 7, before it lists the types of things you can write exceptions about, it says:

Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material you add to a covered work, you may (if authorized by the copyright holders of that material) supplement the terms of this License with terms:

Then going on to say:

c) Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material, or requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in reasonable ways as different from the original version

So the only thing that you can write exceptions about is the material you add to the covered work. Since you just wrote a patch to MySQL, I don't think you've got much of a case to claim that a name change for the majority of the code base is required to prevent misrepresentation of the origin of your patch, nor is changing the name for the main MySQL a reasonable way to mark it as different from your copy+patch. You might be able to try using 7(c), I just don't see many who would go through the trouble to, or it actually getting enforced if they did.

It is a non-lawyer, pragmatist's argument, I know. But that's an accurate description of me.