Will Stallman Kill the "Linux Revolution?"

frdmfghtr writes "The October 30 issue of Forbes Magazine has an article speculating that Richard Stallman's efforts to rewrite the GPL could threaten to 'tear it apart.' The article describes how the GPLv3 is expected to be incompatible with the GPLv2, causing trouble for Linux vendors such as Novell and Red Hat. The article wraps it up: 'And a big loser, eventually, could be Stallman himself. If he relents now, he likely would be branded a sellout by his hard-core followers, who might abandon him. If he stands his ground, customers and tech firms may suffer for a few years but ultimately could find a way to work around him. Either way, Stallman risks becoming irrelevant, a strange footnote in the history of computing: a radical hacker who went on a kamikaze mission against his own program and went down in flames, albeit after causing great turmoil for the people around him.'"

Comments

Re:What a load of sensationalist FUD!

[A beautiful mind]

Exactly. Personally I think that Stallman is a visionary and Linus is too pragmatist in a sense, as Stallman clearly wants to avoid the DRM/"Trusted computing" trap with GPLv3 and Linus can't see medium/longterm about this. Also, he doesn't seem to be really understanding the v3, since he claimed things like digitally signed repositories like apt-get would be not allowed with v3, while Stallman clearly established that it's not the case.

I think Linus is a good coder and project manager, but we shouldn't expect him to "show the way" in issues of principle/vision. He's an engineer, not a "freedom fighter".