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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."
Linus didn't write it, though. Linus wrote the original kernel. Much of the operating system (meaning the kernel plus system utilities) is GNU software, many of which existed as mature software well before the Linux kernel came about, which is where the GNU/Linux argument comes from.
I agree with you that trying to get people to refer to it as GNU/Linux is a lost battle, but to say the reason is because Linus wrote it is silly. Stallman has probably written more code that is currently used in the Linux operating system than Torvalds has.
Here's the newsforge story ("Torvalds' comments on GPLv3 committees refuted").
I blogged about this and added more info about the committees.
One last think I want to point at is a side-by-side diff with the changes highlighted from draft 1 to draft 2 so everyone can see the responses to the public process that the committees talk about in the Newsforge article.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
The linux kernel can be used more or less standalone or with non GNU tools and it'll still be linux. Remove the kernel from linux and what have you got? A bunch of unrunnable tools.
You can run all of the GNU tools on a wide variety of other kernels, so I'm not sure what you're getting at here. The GNU set of tools existed well before Linux, and they would certainly have a great deal of value even if Linux had never been written. The Linux kernel without any tools at all is essentially useless. What's the point of having a running kernel if you don't even have a shell?
Calling it GNU/Linux acknowledges the fact that GNU tools have always provided a big part of the core of the operating system. However, that's not to say that I personally advocate calling it GNU/Linux. Personally, I think that name is just to cumbersome to ever gain widespread acceptance, and it's pointless to try and get people to use it.
You misunderstand the new version of the GPL entirely.
You don't have to share your encryption key, as long as someone without it can modify the software and have it run as normal. Your signing key is yours alone, and as long as your program will run after modification without it, you're fine. The only time you have to share such a key is if it impossible to run a modified copy of the software on the relevant hardware without that key.