Torvalds vs Schwartz GPL Wars

javipas writes "The controversial message published by Linus Torvalds (mirrored) in the Linux Kernel Mailing List was from the beginning to the end an open attack to Sun and its Open Source strategy. Linus criticized Sun's real position on GPL, and claimed that Linux could be dangerous to Sun. Upon his words, "they may be talking a lot more [about Open Source] than they are or ever will be doing." Jonathan Schwartz's blog has been updated today with a post that is a direct response to Linus claims, but in a much more elegant and coherent way. Sun's CEO notes that "Companies compete, communities simply fracture", and tries to explain why using GPL licenses is taking so long."

Comments

Shock new - commercial company wants profit!

[Viol8]

Why is Linux surprised that a commercial company might be holding back on open sourcing a large amount of its intellectual property? Thats what they make money out of. So maybe some people in Sun have been talking up open source wrt to Solaris to get some publicity , so what? This is what companies do to get their product noticed and theres nothing wrong with it (unless you're some publicly funded socialist who does little work but mouths off a lot about some neverland utopian ideal, but I'll leave Stallman for another post). Coporations are what make the western economy run , without them and they're "nasty" hunger for profit we'd all be a lot worse off including all the rabid open source fanboys. Theres nothing wrong with Open Source but lets not start thinking its the solution to any sort of problem , it isn't. The world would still turn without Linux or the FSF. Yeah , mod me down fanboys, see if I care.

Jonathan Schwartz's response

[fatboy]

Jonathan Schwartz's blog has been updated today with a post that is a direct response to Linus claims, but in a much more elegant and coherent way

He sounds like any other corporate fag to me :P

"Companies compete and communities simply fracture"? What is that supposed to infer? There are a ton of competing open source projects. I think Mr.Schwartz does not understand the open source community very well.

Re:Not a bad Linus message

[illumin8]

I tend to listen to Theo's opinion carefully on this subjects.

You shouldn't. After seeing the way that Theo blew up when one of the OpenBSD contributers was rightfully accused of stealing code from a wifi driver without attribution, I will never listen to a word that man says again. The words "crazy" and "psychopath" come to mind.

Re:Linux and GPL3?

[0xABADC0DA]

Linus:

And yes, maybe ZFS is worthwhile enough that I'm willing to go to the effort of trying to relicense the kernel. This looks like Linus saying that ZFS will be the main differentiator for unix-like systems. Apparently ZFS is so much better that Linux must adapt in whatever way practical in order to get it. I think this is really the key to understanding where Linus is coming from. ZFS is looking to be the defacto standard for filesystems for the next decade and even if Linus tries to change the kernel to GPLv3 it will still be years behind Solaris on this. ZFS is already in Solaris, Mac OS X (rsn), and FreeBSD.

What we see here is Linux already starting to be held back by requiring what will be an older out-of-date license and Linus already starting to blame others for it, when with his stewardship it is his choice that caused it. Linux can't use a GPLv3 ZFS because Linus is against using the GPLv3 license. Linus removed the "or later version" clause because he wanted more control over the kernel. The only question is how stubborn and obstinate Linus will be before he decides to support GPLv3, and how much will that hurt Linux.