GPLv3 - A Primer on Open Warfare in Open Source

savio13 writes "A BusinessWeek article about the GPLv3 starts to shed some light on where things are, and what the hold up is in getting the newest version out. They discuss the Stallman vs. Torvalds conflict, issues with DRM, the goal of 'one-stop licensing', and the ever-more-likely possibility that the newest version of the GPL just isn't relevant." From the article: "The impetus to make a profit (and its associated compromises) isn't sitting well with true believers in free software. And the resulting rifts were apparent at last week's LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco. On one side is Richard Stallman and his Free Software Foundation. When Stallman says "free" he doesn't mean price, he means freedom. He believes all software should be freely available to be modified by the public. And for him, this is nothing short of a moral fight. On the other is Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux. He and others in his open-source camp believe that freely sharing code simply produces the best software, but if other people want to hide their code, that's fine, too. Companies will just vote with their feet."

Comments

This explains an email I got

[sherms]

After Slashdot and the Washington Post did an article on our 911 running Linux. I got an email from Richard. correcting me by telling me I should have called it GNU Linux. I emailed him back and said If Linus wrote it and he calls it Linux, thats good enough for me.

Sherm

Re:This explains an email I got

[MankyD]

So you 911 only runs a kernel?

And by your logic, I should have called my old Windows machine "Nullsoft/Apple/HP/GNU/EA Games/Windows". It's not about the periphery software running on top of the system. Using term Linux is blanket enough to describe the architecture for interested parties.

Re:This explains an email I got

[jellomizer]

So now except for dialing 911 we will need to dial 468/911 (GNU/911)

Re:This explains an email I got

[Mr. Underbridge]

If Stallman spent half as much time writing code as correcting people, Hurd might actually be out by now. I think it would be great if someone put out a version of Linux that used all BSD userland crap just to prove the point. Call it BSD/Linux just to confuse the crap out of people.

From the article

[Anonymous Coward]

If Torvalds chooses not to go with version 3 for Linux, the Free Software Foundation will become even more irrelevant to the business world of open source.

So does that mean we call it Linux/GNU then?

The genesis

[hummassa]

Stallman begat Emacs
Emacs begat elisp
elisp begat gcc
gcc begat gnu
gnu begat hurd
hurd has a growth-inhibiting condition, so
gcc begat linux, and qt
qt begat kdelibs
kdelibs begat kde
kde begat kubuntu
and there was light :-)
Any similarity with the truth is mere coincidence.