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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.
I am very grateful for the contributions Linus has made to the world. But he can be an ass from time to time.
And when he said that nothing much changed between the second and third drafts, he was not only being flippant, but ignorant. Many of the changes were in direct response to criticisms he made.
GPLv3 will happen regardless of whether or not it is accepted for the Linux kernel. I'm not sure they need to make Linus happy. I think the GPL crew needs to make the license best suit their needs.
Regardless, I don't think Linus will back down and accept it any time in the future. He has been very clear that the kernel is to be licensed under GPLv2 and GPLv2 exclusively.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
The problem I have with Linux re: GPL 3 is that he's just being ignorant. He has some beef about people having to give out their own personal private keys that has been shot down by any number of people that actually know what they are talking about legally (PJ, Eben, etc). Just casually reading the license and Linus' comments, he just isn't making any sense.
My best bet is that Linus doesn't actually want to understand the GPL v3. Linux is eminently practical, and the practical thing to do to increase Linux usage, fix bugs, and add new features is to make Linux corporate friendly. A *lot* of contributions come from the likes of IBM, Red Hat, Sun, Novell, and other companies. I bet the prospect of these companies pulling out their support is a major consideration (whether intentional or not).
Well, yes, good point. A very good point.
But...I dunno. Until Linux came along, these things seemed a bit on the fringe to me, except for Emacs, which predates the FSF anyway. I installed GCC and GDB once or twice in the early 90s, but it never did as good a job as the compiler and debugger you always got along with your proprietary Unix, which you got along with your workstation. (The $1000 license fee being peanuts compared to the $40,000 hardware anyway.)
So at least in my experience -- and I admit I was a scientific programmer, a user, and not a systems programmer or applications developer -- the GNU tools were pretty much just curiosities until Linux made it possible to run Unix on your PC. Now that was a Great Thing. All the elegance, stability, security and network-savviness of the work computer now available at home. Very nice. And the GNU tools made that possible, yes. But the free kernel was the keystone to that arch, I think. Linux could have squeaked by with few less GNU tools (albeit not without GCC), but I think all the GNU tools would have remained curiosities without the free kernel. As soon as a great free Unix existed, a lot of people jumped in to add what was still missing, like a fancy desktop instead of plain old X and fvwm, drivers, or package managers instead of a giant tarball and a 64kb README. But would people have ever jumped in to create the kernel, knowing the various GNU system applications already existed? Well, they didn't -- not until Linus. Maybe it had to wait until hardware prices came down, so if it hadn't been Linus it would've been someone else anyway. But maybe it's also harder for people to get excited when they see a bunch of pieces lying around, so that if maybe you built the central piece you could assemble everything into a coherent whole. Maybe it's easier to get excited when you can see a working model, even if it's crude and belches smoke everywhere, and could use some serious extra tinkering to work better. It's from that point of view that I think Linux has inspired and will inspire more people to do OSS work, or use it, than GNU. Maybe Linus is Shakespeare stealing Roger Bacon's plays -- but it's nevertheless Shakespeare who gets remembered in the history books.
Also, what I recall (vaguely) is that between '85 and '95 or so, the GNU kernel was always coming along Real Soon Now, but seemed stuck because they wanted to Get It Right. Let's just pass lightly over the gcc/egcs wierdness, which is maybe harder to understand than the Pope's nuanced position on masturbation among priests. I think substantial dithering got short-circuited by Linus, and by the people fired up about Linux,
Now, I'm not saying RMS or the FSF's work isn't highly valuable. The value of their work isn't what I'm talking about at all. What I'm saying is that I think the future belongs more to people like Linus -- that they will have more lasting influence -- because, as the OP said, they seems more focussed on getting stuff out the door, and the FSF (and RMS in particular) seem more focussed on making sure it's the right stuff, built with the right moral philosophy, isn't going to exploit the masses or give you karma, et cetera. In all my working experience, folks who spend substantial amounts of energy on the aesthetics of their product rather than on its bare ugly function get chewed up by the real world sooner or later. Jobs and NeXT, Betamax vs. VHS, Multics, DEC's Alpha chip -- tragedies like that come to mind. The perfect is often the enemy of the good, as they say.