Torvalds Critiques of GPLv3 and FSF Refuted

j00bar writes "After Linus Torvalds' impassioned critiques of the second draft of GPLv3 and the community process the FSF has organized, Newsforge's Bruce Byfield discovered in conversations with the members of the GPLv3 committees that the committee members disagree; they believe not only has the FSF been responsive to the committees' feedback but also that the second draft includes some modifications in response to Torvalds' earlier criticisms." NewsForge and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.

Comments

Who cares what Linus thinks about the GPLv3?

[Korgan]

Maybe I'm being ignorant here, but if anyone actually reads the version of the GPL that is used by and distributed with the Linux kernel, it does not allow you to use a later version. The Linux kernel is, and always will be, GPLv2. That was a conscious decision by Linus and the other developers.

Because of that, who really cares what Linus has to say about the GPLv3? He's made it pretty clear he doesn't like it, but the only work that he's producing that anyone cares about is Linux. And the Linux kernel will never be anything other than GPLv2. Even if they /WANTED/ to change it, too many people that have contributed in the past under the GPLv2 license are either dead or simply not accessible to get their permission to change to the newer license. The logistics of keeping track of which part is GPLv2 and which might become GPLv3 just makes it simply "too hard."

Personally, I don't give a damn if Linus likes GPLv3 or not. Its not about Linus, its about everyone in the Free software community as a whole. Individuals can go shoot their feet off instead of their mouth. Its about whats best for the majority, not just Linux or just Gnome or just GCC or just whatever...
[/rant]

Re:GNU project non-existent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nowhere did I say "all" utilities. The "GNU utilities" refers to things such as the entire coreutils package.

My point doesn't need all utilities to be written by the FSF, of course. The parent merely implied that the FSF didn't do *any* coding toward his software freedom in ignorance. My pointing of *some* contradicts a statement that there were none at all.

If you missed these connections, I apologize and stress that I will point out the doubly (and more) obvious in future posts. I should have known better than to point out the singly obvious when there are so many ways to miss the obvious!

"vote with your wallet" doesn't work

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

Issues such as DRM cannot be tackled by consumer choices in the market. There are two reasons.

First, the market is not granular enough. The consumer will never be given the choice of DRM'd CDs vs. DRMless CDs. The options are decided by marketing teams, and they will give consumers choices such as DRM'd CDs or nothing.

Secondly, like a mutual-loss based price war between two companies where the rich one waits for the poorer one to run out of funds, in this battle, if the consumers ever lose, there is no way back. Once DRM is pervasive, consumers no longer have any way to leverage the DRMers. If an ISP wants people to accept worse service, they have to offer something (such as a lower price) constantly. If a company wants consumers to accept DRM, they just have to get consumers to accept this once and to purchase DRM'd hardware (and they do this by leveraging a tangental market, such as the content industry), and then there is no way for the consumer to roll this back.