GPLv3 - A Primer on Open Warfare in Open Source

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Monday August 21, 2006 @02:10AM from the tuxes-go-marching-two-by-two-hurrah-hurrah dept.

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."

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Simple queston by Anonymous Coward · 2006-08-21 03:32 · Score: -1, Offtopic

Ok, this is one question that I still have about the GPL, version 2 or 3.

IF I write code and link against GCC libraries and I chose not to distribute this code, can I (as a convenience) distribute the libraries with my code?

There seems to be a clause in v2 which implies that if I distrubute the libraries as well, the GPL applies to the entire work and my code must be opened. However, it would seem to be inconvenient to force end users to have to resolve all the dependencies themselves.

Is this the same in v3?