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Torvalds "Pretty Pleased" With Latest GPLv3
Novus Ordo Seclorum writes "According to CNet, Linus Torvalds is 'pretty pleased' with the current GPL v3 draft. He said, 'Unlike the earlier drafts, it at least seems to not sully the good name of the GPL any more.' After his earlier criticism, some had questioned whether such controversies would lead to rifts in the community, especially if the kernel ended up under a different license than the GNU tools. But with the latest revisions, Linus will entertain moving the kernel over to the GPL v3."
Of course there was negotiation, but I'm sure Linus paid for his own lunch.
Forget diamonds, copyright is forever.
While Linus Torvalds is not the sole copyright holder of the Linux kernel, it cannot be denied that an "official" project to shift the kernel from GPLv2 to GPLv3 would open up some interesting possibilities.
One immediate question I would have is whether he would leave in the "or any later version" clause this time or remove it again. If he does that we might have to go through this whole mess again in another 15 years, but maybe that's the idea.
Linux as GPL3 only becomes of true importance if OpenSolaris also becomes GPL3. If that is the case, there could be an immediate and dramatic improvement seen in both projects as the code starts to flow both ways. OpenSolaris could start to take advantage of the driver code in Linux (or at least, use it to make the code Solaris would need) and Linux could start working on goodies like Dtrace support. Mutually beneficial, and everyone wins.
Of course, there is no reason beyond speculation to think Solaris will use GPL3. The situation is potentially very exciting, but it would require both Solaris and Linux to move from their current license and neither decision will be made lightly.
Fingers crossed...
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
The bottom line is that FSF cannot realistically release a GPLv3 that doesn't have Linus' stamp of approval. Linux is just too big a part of the Free software community to ignore. Of course Stallman and/or Eben Moglen had to convince Linus. It seems to be that at least some of changes were in direct response to his criticisms.
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Commercial licenses are also viral, most of licenses do NOT allow you to redistribute/resell products using their tools/librairies, unless you pay an extravagant fee.
People who try to scare you when saying that the GPL is viral are the same ones who put patents over their code and resell you their tools for a fee.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
I still don't feel that Linus "gets it" about GPLv3. I'm still not entirely sure about GPLv3 myself, and I should probably go back and read a draft.
But, at least now it's obvious he's reading and comprehending. He may still disagree with it, and I disagree with him, but it looks like they're talking now.
Which is more than I can say about the last round of flamewars... Last time, he honestly sounded like a Slashdotter who hadn't bothered to RTFA, just repeating the same unfounded arguments, some of which were blatantly wrong to anyone who actually read the license...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Watch how fast Sun becomes "displeased" with the latest GPL3 draft, and considers not open-sourcing Solaris under the GPL3 license.
Seriously, this is not a troll. I am convinced that the only reason Sun was considering this is because the Linux project was not. There is no chance in hell they want to see any of their kernel code end up inside the Linux kernel.
Who the hell is Ken?
Novell on board? Do you think they are going to jump at the chance to hang themselves (again)?
The article submitter paints a bit rosier picture than the article and quotes actually support:
Torvalds: "The current draft makes me think it's at least a possibility in theory, but whether it's practical and worth it is a totally different thing," he said. "Practically speaking, it would involve a lot of work to make sure everything relevant is GPLv3-compatible even if we decided that the GPL 3 is OK."
Basically, GPLv3 makes it go from "impossible" to "maybe someday". I doubt Linux is moving off of GPLv2 anytime soon, though. I doubt most GPLv2 projects are, and suspect those that do will fork instead of go completely to GPLv3. This will more or less be the open source community shooting itself in the foot.
E pluribus unum
Maybe the clause is just that, a clever scheme to teach people to read carefully. I was once in a situation where an employment contract had a "or any later version" clause. The contract was contested and found to be in fact illegal in Finland. I realize contract and copyright law are different, just an example that read before you agree to anything.
But Mozilla was, what, two years old? And for the most part, almost all the significant developers were Netscape employees.
Linux has got to be about 15 years old, and no one organization holds the copyright on the bulk of the code. It'll take a lot more work to make a relicensing possible.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The only projects I've ever released under a GPL license are projects that I inherited under a GPL license. I'm reluctant to "give away" my code under a license that takes away (or at least reserves for me) rights from other people that may want to use it -- I'd like to really give it away, no strings attached, or to actually sell it. The GPL's it's-yours-but-you-can-only-like-I-say seems a lot like giving a "gift" to someone that you really bought for yourself.
I think I understand the motivation behind the GPL (but I could be wrong), and I'm not angry that other people use it, but to me it seems like a distasteful compromise between giving and keeping, and that sort of license holds no interest for me at all.
How is it misleading? The summary says "But with the latest revisions, Linus will entertain moving the kernel over to the GPL v3" - which means pretty much what the quote of Linus you gave says, "The current draft makes me think it's at least a possibility in theory, but whether it's practical and worth it is a totally different thing."
How are these significantly different?
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GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Let's not forget the FSF style concern 0:
0. It IS broken.
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Are you seriously suggesting that all objections to the GPL are groundless and that all other licenses are somehow undermining 'software freedom' (What does that mean exactly?), because they aren't part of the one true way? Personally I'd release under MIT/BSD over GPL, because it is truly free of any restrictions, but still copyright the author, so it can be used by the world for any purpose as the author intended. Just because the GPL doesn't allow that doesn't mean it's not something people want to do.
A fair case could be made for the GPL being unfree in that it excludes all other licenses. Akin to monotheism's insistence that you shall not worship other gods.
Your analogy assumes he disagreed with the implementation, but not the intent (if indeed it makes any sense at all?). In fact he disagreed with the intent, and therefore removed the clause.
As to the clause in question "or any other version" - this is a contentious clause, I'm not surprised he took it out. Why would anyone possibly agree to be bound by any and all future conditions that they haven't even seen; you may as well say "or any other license the maintainer chooses in the future". I doubt that clause is even legally binding. On a project with multiple contributors who retain copyright, you'll always have to go back to them to ask about changes - similar to a change of terms and conditions from your bank; they have to notify you in writing of changes. If anything the only mistake Linus made was not to set up a foundation and assign copyright to that - an understandable oversight when starting out, and one which they may start to slowly remedy.
Who are 'the free software community' and why do you presume to speak for them?
People will vote with their feet- if GPLv3 is truly the one pure license as you seem to believe, they'll choose it. I personally don't see any problem with a proliferation of licenses - the bad ones will be weeded out by natural selection. If you don't like using the Linux kernel and truly think the maintainer is an egomaniac, go start your own instead of gratuitously insulting the man who maintains it. Perhaps you could contribute to and use HURD instead?
Most don't.
There. The second time you got it right. One of the reasons why FOSS works so well is that people are mostly programming to their interests. Big companies can pay people to do things that they don't really care about, but it's generally not as high a quality of work as people who are working on something because they love it.
Here's a way of thinking of the GPL that may change some of your attitude to it. Let's say you were a generous donor to the community and wanted to donate a really nice new playground to the city parks that would be free and available for anyone to use. To make sure your gift stayed available for everyone to use, you add the condition that the city cannot close it off and make it a "pay to enter" playground. Your gift was to the people in the community, but if you don't have that condition on it, it leaves the city with the "freedom" to take that gift away from those you wanted to give it to.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
You don't seem to understand how the GPL2 "or, at your option, a later version" clause works. If Linus were to have licensed the kernel under a "GPL2 or, at your option, the yet to be created Linus Public Licenses to be created by Linus Torvalds", then the second Linus started selling copies of Linux under his LPL v1--which allows companies to not distributing source--*anyone* could fork the current code base under the GPL2 *only* and take away Linus' "dictatorship" over the kernel. Would this be a large upset to the kernel community? Of course--just as would be true if Linus decided to take all the "GPL2 or at your option, later version code" and work to form a GPL3 kernel; no matter what the license change or possibly even the *lack* of a license change will motivate forks, as forks of the Linux kernel are happening all the time.
Your position is about as silly as believing that if Microsoft bought out the Mozilla Foundation tomorrow and relicensed all the code under a closed license (assuming they could) that (a) people would continue to support and use Mozilla Firefox and ilk as if nothing had happened and (b) that no one would fork the existing code base and try to lure the disillusioned community to create a mechanism to further decrease the chances of such happening again.
Yes, there's certainly a great bit of room to argue that allowing the FSF to retain control over possible future Linux licensing is bad, but the wording of the license won't magical dissolve the current license on current code. The real beauty of free software isn't the direct effect of so much GPL source being available; it's that so much GPL source being available, and a license that exists to continue that source to be GPL, motivates people to build communities to ever further work the useful and usable into something that will evolve with the needs of developers and users; except in things like very simple appliances, unmodified code stagnates to the point of disuse.
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Nice conspiracy theory about Linus.
All the words out of Linus's mouth, however, show you that you're completely wrong. While it may be true that Linux is under one license and only one license, Linus basically doesn't care because that license does what he wants. And now he's seriously considering moving to GPLv3 because the current draft is braindead in his opinion. Which pretty much annihilates your argument.
Obviously another FSF fanatic...
As far as "egomaniacs" go, nobody can beat Stallman - not even Bill Gates.
Sorry, clowns. "Linux" will REMAIN LINUX, not "GNU/Linux".
Get over it.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
The problem is that some companies, like Novell, made a deal that pisses off the FSF fanatics, even though there is ZERO evidence of any harm actually coming from that deal either now or in the future.
The FSF fanatics then made this draft of the GPL which was intended to "punish" Novell for doing this, and in so doing, damage one of the main Linux distros that is actually capable of being accepted by the corporate market for the desktop.
The problem for Novell was that if they continued in the Microsoft deal, they would be unable to distribute GPLv3 code - which would include most, maybe all, of the GNU utilities. This would require Novell to essentially "fork" the GNU utilities and take up maintenance of all those under the GPLv2 included with SUSE. While this would probably be doable, it would increase Novell's costs and possibly damage their ability to make a profit on Linux and possibly damage SUSE's uptake in the corporate market.
The fact that this was a stupid policy for the FSF to take seems to have become apparent to some people, so a "grandfather" clause was added that exempted all such deals prior to March 27,2007. Some FSF fanatics who only want to punish Novell complained, so now the FSF is trying to distance themselves from this clause.
In other words, the FSF is now between a rock and a hard place of their own making. They screwed up by explicitly trying to damage an OSS success - a Linux distro - and then irritated their more fanatical members by offering Novell a way out.
If they hadn't been overly concerned about the Novell deal - which, again, is irrelevant to the future of OSS and free software - they wouldn't be in this position.
In turn, the fanatics, some of whom are posting here, now try to blame Linus Torvalds for this situation because he was vociferously opposed to the previous GPLv3 drafts. They now try to claim that his omitting a "license upgrade" clause in his Linux license, supposedly preventing him from converting to GPLv3, is why he made his criticisms of GPLv3. This is a stupid argument since his arguments against the GPLv3 drafts stand on their own merits - and were supported by a state made by a number of other Linux kernel developers. Not to mention that Linus is now seriously considering the current GPLv3 as an appropriate license for Linux (although he clearly still has some reservations and wants to think about it more.)
I happen to agree with you - it's all bullshit as long as it's open source. The problem is that, as usual, it is the FACTIONS that want to damage each other that are causing trouble. Here it seems clear that the FSF wants to damage OSS more than OSS "wants" to damage "free" software. I suspect that most OSS developers are perfectly happy with the free software licenses existing, whereas most FSF fanatics seem to want to eliminate OSS licenses and force everyone to use an FSF license. You can see this attitude in Stallman's and other's attacks on Linux for not being called "GNU/Linux".
Stallman doesn't want "freedom" - he wants control of what anybody CALLS "freedom". If it isn't HIS way, it's the highway. And if he has to damage Linux to do it, he will.
That's the problem.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
In other words, Stallman is a visionary. Linus is just a great engineer.
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