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Linus Says No GPLv3 for the Linux Kernel
HenchmenResources writes "Late Wednesday a posting from Linus Torvalds appered on the the Linux Kernel Mailing List. In it Linus states that the Linux Kernel will remain under the GPLv2. Types Linus,"The "version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version" language in the GPL copying file is not - and has never been - part of the
actual License itself.""
This comes as no great surprise. How could Linus convert it to v3, even if he wanted to? There are thousands of individual copyright holders to contact (not everyone released it under "any later version"). For some of them, that's going to require a seance and/or JLH, since they are dead now. I consider this a non-story, personally, we knew this was going to happen before v3 was even announced.
Discussion over GPLv3 has been going on for quite some time now even though the draft has just now emerged. He has mentioned a few things, one is that he has no problem with DRM in the kernel, whereas GPLv3 is Anti-DRM. Also Linus opposed having his developers have to make their private keys available, which was stated in the article.
I think he's thought it though, and I think the decision makes sense. No one says you have to increment from GPLv2 to GPLv3, it is at your option. RMS make the license more restrictive, too restrictive, therefore Linus said no.
I'm with you on this. I distruct Richard Stallman for the same reasons. I personally think he's gone off on a side road of his original mission. Originally, it was to provide a bunch of software that was open to all and protected by copyright. Now, it seems his mission is to attempt to destroy anything that isn't open to all and protected in the ways he wants to define it. The first is setting up a safe haven for intellectual ideas and the like. The second is waging a war. I don't want a war and have no time for it. I prefer to live and let live and have no problem with OSS and proprietary software coexisting. Stallman no longer wants to coexist so I've not supported his views for some time.
"If a GPLv3ed program cannot run without a specific private key, that private key must be made available. That's all the license says. Developers are not required to disclose private keys that they use to sign code."
This simple, clear statement should be at the beginning. I think if you argue about this in the future, you would help your case to lead with this, and then back it up afterwards.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
This license is less free than others because of the new provisions. I predict that the new wording will drive more new projects to BSD style licensing.
heh. That depends on what you mean by free:
A) Free as in free to do what you like with. eg, GPLv2 is more "free" in this sense because businesses have more "freedom" to DRM or patent encumber software under this license.
B) GPLv3 has more restrictions in place to guarantee that software licensed under it is not encumbered by patents or DRM restrictions. Thus it guarantees that DRM and patent restrictions don't restrict people "freedom" to use the software.
BSD style is more free in terms of (A) and less free in terms of (B). For example I am "Free" to contribute secretly patented code to your BSD project and then take you to court for patent infringement when you distribute said software. Is that a freedom you intended to grant me or would you actually have preferred to use a more restrictive license after all?
It sounds like his gripe with the GPLv3 is that it is imposing restrictions on what modifications or contributions can be made, which is not the same agnostic view as in previous versions.
The idealist (RMS) and the engineer (Linus) are definitely at a point of contention on this issue...it'll be interesting to see what happens.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
It's one thing to assign copyright to FSF, quite another to assign it a random non-profit organization. FSF has some history and widespread recognition, and one can be reasonably confident that they'll survive and remain true to their vision.
On the other hand, if somebody set up a non-profit to create the nextest bestest portal application, there's a real chance that the non-profit org could go bankrupt, regardless of the sincerity of their intention. Or the org could undergo a leadership change and a change of philosophy. If you had assigned your code to them, it could easily wind up in a proprietary commercial application. The GPL would protect existing releases, but anybody who held all the copyrights could update and re-release under a proprietary license.
Even if the terms of assignation were written to preclude this, such provisions might not survive bankruptcy.
> People yield code. I was replying to the statement that the Linux kernel is more popular
> with both individuals and companies because it is more flexible (from a copyright
> standpoint) than HURD.
No.
Linux is more popular than HURD because at certain critical points in history it was "working" and "ready" for definitions of "working" and "ready" that could not really be applied to HURD at the time. Basically, Linux was in the right place at the right time. HURD never showed up to the party, and there was a licensing lawsuit connected with BSD at a particularly critical point in time which left it just a little behind in just the wrong ways at just the wrong time, allowing Linux to get "ahead" in terms of mindshare and popularity in the developer community. Consequently, there was a several-month time window, at a particularly important time in history (right about when a lot of college undergrads were first getting net access) when if you wanted a freely-available, freely-modifiable, freely-redistributable operating system, Linux was _the_ obvious choice. That gave it a leg up, got a lot of people involved with improving it, and made it the leading and most popular free OS. Nothing has yet managed to unseat it from that position.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that the FSF's policies haven't hampered HURD development. They likely have. What I'm saying is that that is not the key important reason why Linux is ahead of HURD (both in terms of popularity and development cycle). The key reason is because Linus had working, usably complete code at an important time when the FSF (in terms of a kernel) did not.
If the timing had worked out differently, the HURD might have been in the leading position, in spite of the FSF's (admittedly rather strict) copyright policies. It is notable that a number of the FSF's *other* projects, despite said policies, are leading implementations in their respective niches, because those projects were finished to the degree they needed to be and working to the degree they needed to be when they needed to be. Emacs for instance was there enough and working enough (for _most_ of the folks who wanted an Emacs, albeit not for Lucent) that XEmacs is just another, somewhat less popular alternative, rather than completely eclipsing Gnu Emacs as Linux has done to HURD.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.