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Torvalds Puts Support Behind GPL2 Linux
Christiangrays writes "Linux creator Linus Torvalds has used an interview being made public by the Linux Foundation to stress that version 2 of the GPL still makes the most sense for the Linux kernel over the newer GPL version 3. GPL 3, which was released last year by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), reflects the FSF's goals while GPL 2 closely matches what Torvalds thinks a licence should do, Torvalds said. "I want to pick the licence that makes the most sense for what I want to do. And at this point in time, Version 2 matches what I think we want to do much, much better than Version 3," said Torvalds, who is now a fellow at the foundation. He was interviewed in late-October by Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin."
Before everyone starts arguing about the merits of GPLv3, let's remember that it's just the license for the kernel. It's not going to be changing much when used in proprietary consumer devices. On the other hand, if it's not going to change it much, why lock it up? Kinda a moot point...
a: This is very old news, from back in October, just rehashed to get more clicks.
b: It is irrelevant. Even if Linus loved the GPLv3, there is so much code contributed to the Linux kernel without a transfer of copyright and under GPLv2 only terms that it couldn't be changed anyway.
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A lot of people characterise Torvalds as being pragmatic as opposed to Stallman's idealism, but Stallman is pragmatic too, he just looks further ahead than Torvalds. This short-sightedness doesn't pay off. Stallman warned about the BitKeeper problem, but Torvalds didn't do anything about it until the situation blew up in his face. The FSF started requiring a paper trail for GNU contributions, Torvalds didn't follow their lead until SCO started suing.
I'm not a fan of GPLv3, but I can't understand why people consistently deride Stallman and worship Torvalds. Stallman is consistently proven right.
Wait, so GPL 2 is "locking code up?" Where were all these people who had strong anti-GPL 2 sentiments before 3 was released? Was it not good enough then, or are we just angry because the FSF is telling us to be?
So now, suddenly, since there is a new version of the GPL, anyone who stays on the old version hates software freedom?
Wow. That's kind of an extreme way to look at it. Especially since RMS himself said that there's nothing wrong with continuing to use GPL V2, if that's what a project wants to do. If I were RMS, I would forbid the packaging of any GNU code with a GPLv2 GNU/Linux. Without altering the language of the GPL, simply put, he can't.
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Before everyone starts arguing about the merits of GPLv3, let's remember that it's just the license for the kernel. It's not going to be changing much when used in proprietary consumer devices. On the other hand, if it's not going to change it much, why lock it up? Kinda a moot point...
The real question, is how would a move to GPLv3 benefit Linux? If the answer is not at all, then by keeping it a GPLv2 helps make everyone's life simpler. Any change in license would in certain cases mean that Linux would have to revetted by legal departments in a number of companies and for TiVO-like products a real pain in the neck.
In many ways GPLv3 is a reaction to DRM, but getting all religious about things is not going to be the solution either, IMHO.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Welcome to the license wars, where both sides are populated by fanatical idiots. Stallman, in particular, gets on my nerves because he's become nothing more than pontificating mushroom. At least Torvalds remains a productive member of society, even if he's a bit of troll in his own right.
The nice thing about lots of licenses is that you, as the developer or development team, can pick the one that you feel best serves your project's interests. It seems to me the license wars are the very dichotomy of the idea of an open license, because they're all about trying to force developers down a specific path.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The GPL3 doesn't protect against patent claims by entities that have not distributed the particular code released under that license.
Hmm. I find your lack of faith disturbing. Do not underestimate the power of Linux:
"Linux can do endless loops in six seconds." -- Linus Torvalds.
GPLv2 worked fine for Linux in the past . Why wouldn't it work fine for Linux now .
It would be less acceptable if Linus immediatelly accepted GPLv3 , without looking at it . The fact that he stays with GPLv2 means he looked into it , and decides to play on the safe side and stay with a license that worked well.
Slipping shoelaces ?
Most people who use computers are way more concerned over their userland experience than over what kernel is the basis of the OS. For various reasons, Linux the kernel is going to stay at GPL2, but the folks who brought us the license have looked at the situation and determined there were some serious flaws, so they went on to version three, much as Linus keeps modifying his kernel because a longer view and rethinking warrants that. It is the natural order of things. It is a *pity* he cannot see that both of these advances are necessary, you cannot just sit at a stasis point and think you have all your bases covered.
What he wants is his cake and eat it too, it is OK for him to keep coming out with new and improved versions of his stuff, but other people have to stay stuck with an older version of the critically important license? Why is this? Does he exist in some bizzaro world where he can't see the obvious threats from patent troll companies and the redmond monopolist gorilla and so on? He can claim to be a-political, but modern reality is politics and laws affect you whether you want them to or not, you can't go hide your head under the covers and just hope the boogieman goes away. And that is exactly what he keeps claiming he is going to do. Someone needs to take his baby bottle away from him and make him grow up a little. I like his kernel but he is being quite naieve and childish. I will be switching operating systems to the first decent kernel and userland package that goes to gpl3, because the future comes regardless of what Linus wishes to not-happen. If he can't be bothered to read some damn IT news now and then and stay up on the issues, maybe he needs a vacation from coding and go read some. How would he like it if a lot of people just told him to stop coming up with new kernel versions? Would he pitch a fit, just stop, or what? Nope, but he wants everyone else to stop being affected by modern laws and bogus business practices-well, he just ain't that powerful. He is living in a virtual reality make believe world where he can stop the clock on some point that he picks at random and assumes that that is all there is to it, just because he says so. Sorry, but that is just plain vanilla dumb. He's a smart guy when it comes to coding, but just doesn't get it on some things. In other words he is human, and has made a major mistake on this.
Hopefully some place like Sun will go to a gpl3 kernel and those of us who look forward to a better future with FOSS can move on, and the political and business luddites can stay stuck back in time, and to each their own, choice is good. What is going to happen to them though eventually is they are one major court decision away from being screwed over royally by some huge company or cartel. Unless he thinks the sco case was all there was to it and all is well. That's another naive thought,. the multi billion dollar company out there has only begun to defend their market share, and they have more cash to do this with than some nations GNP. he is naive to think they will ignore Linux forever just because sco is mostly over. That was a low profile scouting expedition, they haven't even started on the major artillery barrage yet, and the more it looks like they are threatened, the closer we get to that big guns stage, so the faster we can get a full FOSS implementation of the GPL3 idea out there the better, because that is the best anti patent troll armor we have right now. Linus is offering *nothing whatsoever* to counter this threat at this point other than his blankie and wishful thinking.
Hey Sun, are you paying attention? You waited some years too long to open Java, don't fart around with Solaris, GPL3 it NOW. Learn from past mistakes. You will quintuple volunteer devs within a week if you do so, and gain huge props and creds and mindshare in the global FOSS community, and you know what follows after that, which is more business.
You cannot outright purchase such support, but you can get it for free by changing your license and opening it up.
Think about it,don't waste anymore time on this. Linus intransigence is your business opportunity of the century right now.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
All copyright licensing effects a political end, which is the private ownership and control of the right to copy. All law originates in politics, and most politics originates in economics.
Bruce Perens.
RMS is absolutely brilliant, no doubt about it. Anyone who has known him in real life can attest to his brilliance. He body of work speaks for itself, he has consistently predicted things that would happen and proposed solutions. His being the "smartest guy in the room" gives him tremendous abilities to logically predict trends well before those of us normally gifted" people, and with the ability to look like magic divination to those that are of normal intelligence or lower. These facts are not in dispute.
However, for all RMS's brilliance, his lack of social grace, to put it mildly, undermines him as the CEO of the Free Software/Open Source Enterprise. Indeed, the fact that his "movement" was hijacked and renamed Open Source, and his operating system was hijacked and renamed from GNU to Linux, is a testament to that.
Big companies don't hire CEO's that can forecast the future. CEO's hire rooms of people that do that. Companies hire CEOs that can communicate the vision of the company to the outside world AND the people inside the company. The forecasting ability of Stallman is tremendous, but the lack of communication skills is devastating for him as leader of the movement. It's tragic, because he wants to hold the reigns because this is 100% all his idea, but he's a lousy spokesman for his own ideas, and lost control by not finding a better one.
The Biggest Elephant in the Room: Copyright ownership and standing
The most important thing to the FSF is copyright assignment to maintain a single owner to have standing to enforce. If this is so important to free software, why was that not incorporated into the license. You could have a provision that did roughly the following:
1. You are free to modify for your own use, no need to even agree to license
2. You are free to distribute modifications, if you do, you agree that your modifications are a derivative work, and all copyright is maintained by the maintainer of the software (define this in the license, first person to distribute becomes maintainer, unless a new maintainer is named by them)
3. You are free to fork, but you have to rename the software, you then become maintainer of the fork, owning all derivative changes from here on out of your version
That might not have been an obvious problem in the 80s, but given the Emacs vs. Xemacs ownership of code issue (Xemacs could use Emacs, but not vice versa because FSF requires ownership of all copyrights), arguments about relicensing, etc., this was obvious by the time v3 was created. Some solution should have been found to maintain single ownership of projects for the purpose of standing that didn't require a lot of paperwork.
Examples of this:
1. GNU vs. Linux... Linux sounds like Unix (people knew Unix, liked Unix, but couldn't afford Unix), and the fact that it's a play on a name is irrelevant. Digital Unix, Xenix, HP-UX, etc., all prepped people for a *ux/*ix name for a Unix. GNU? Hard to pronounce, a silly inside joke, etc., lousy brand. The system didn't become Linux instead of GNU by fluke, Linux's superior name and brand displaced GNU.
2. Free Software / Open Source: Open Source is descriptive... there is more to it than the source being viewable, but that's the main action item, the rest is details. Free Software? confusingly vague, similar to Freeware (an already existing term with a lousy brand), and required a "manifesto" to understand. In fact, the existence of a "manifesto" was problematic, because we only here the word "manifesto" used in conjunction with "crazy people" and "revolutionaries," with a tremendous overlap between them. Free Software, captured the ideal if you understood the concept... clever for someone with a 180 IQ to create, interesting for people in the 130-150 range to understand and ponder, and meaninglessly abstract for someone in the normal range... bad branding #2, and RMS lost his movement.
3. Emacs vs. Xemacs: the exchange ab
I can buy an analog TV converter box because the government is paying for me to have two of them. I can not buy a TV Guide on Screen converter box because none is available and the format is proprietary and DRM-locked.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
That really depends on how you define freedom.
As a free software developer, I want to give any (especially any other free software/open source) developer the option of (re)using my code for his/her projects. If I choose the GPLv3, then only other developers who want to push the GPLv3 can use my code legally. What about those who wish to remain using GPLv2? Or what about those who /can't/ relicense to GPLv3 for some reason? They get screwed. That's not freedom, that's tyranny under the freedom banner.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the intentions of the GPLv3 supporters (yourself included) are noble, but forcing your ideals onto other people is no better than what you proclaim to be fighting against.
Note: I've been contacted by debian maintainers for a handful of my libraries due to some application or another linking against one of my GPL libraries and another library with an incompatible license. The latest example of this was some program linking to my lib and openssl - the debian maintainer asked me if I'd be willing to provide a linking exception. My solution was to simply change my license to LGPLv2.1 (which is what the other contributors to my lib were comfortable changing it to). To avoid similar problems in the future, I'll be starting new projects using BSD (minus advert clause) or MIT X11 most likely. This whole GPL thing has just been a big headache to me and I regret ever choosing it.
The main reason I ever chose to license my code under GPL in the first place is that that's what most other projects were licensed under and being that it was the more restrictive license, it allowed me to not worry too much about looking over source code for most other projects.
As I have come to realise, though, is that having my projects licensed under GPL, it has caused problems with getting my library adopted by some other free software projects due to linking to some other lib or another with an incompatible license. This is really frustrating.
Going with the MIT X11 or BSD licenses in the future is unfortunately going to limit my ability to build on top of other libraries, but I've come to the conclusion that that is what is best for what I believe.
Bashing people for not using your preferred license is not a very "freedom lover" thing to do, it's very hypocritical if you ask me.
I know that your feeling is that the GPLv3 protects the end users (and that's fine and dandy), but it doesn't necessarily make developer's lives any better nor does it promote true freedom - freedom for anyone to do whatever they want. It only promotes freedom for end users which is but a subset of the affected people.
The way I see it, by promoting true freedom everywhere, it means that while some software vendors may take (my?) free software and use it in their proprietary products - end users can still decide to obtain their software from someone else if said vendor doesn't give them what they want (which might be that they want the source code). So everyone still wins. Proprietary software vendors win because they can still use my code. End users still win because they can demand the source code in an attempt to make the vendor change his/her mind or they can go elsewhere.
But more to the point, it means that other free software developers are able to use my code without license incompatibility frustrations.
It's hard to believe that someone who is as intelligent as you appear to be and has done as much thought about the issue as you have, could have come to such a completely incorrect conclusion.
> That's not freedom, that's tyranny under the freedom banner.
This is a *complete* mischaracterization of the situation. You are using the absolute wrong terms here when you say 'freedom' and 'tyranny'. First off, freedom is such a loaded word that it's really hard to extract anything meaningful out of its use in situations like this. But 'tyranny under the freedom banner' is so clearly just *wrong*. The author of the GPLv3 is giving access to the copyrighted work under very specific terms. These terms don't take way anyone's freedom, and they don't establish any tyranny. They just give fewer freedoms than I suppose you would like them to give. I'd hardly call that 'tyranny'. To use an analogy, if I let any of the neighborhood kids play in my yard but I require that they not play baseball because I am worried that they'll break a window, am I being a tyrant? Not letting them come into my yard to fetch a ball that they accidentally hit there, would probably be tyranny. Not letting them play in my yard at all, maybe tyranny depending on your viewpoint, but I would argue not tyranny because it's my yard and really no one has a right to it except me. But letting them play in my yard and establishing a few rules that I require them to follow? How is that tyranny? And similarly, how is *giving away* the fruits of my labor, but with certain stipulations that don't affect how they use the software at all, just how they redistribute it - how can you possibly call that tyranny?
> I'm sure the intentions of the GPLv3 supporters (yourself included) are noble, but forcing your ideals
> onto other people is no better than what you proclaim to be fighting against.
I thought only people who hadn't put any thought into these issues at all used this argument. I guess not. Can you please explain how anyone is 'forcing [their] ideals onto other people' by releasing software for those other people to choose to either use or not use, depending on a) whether the software is useful to them and b) whether or not they agree to the licensing terms? Do you think that someone publishing a book is 'forcing their ideals' onto other people because those other people, if they were to choose to buy the book, would not be able to photocopy it for their friends? Forget about my pre-emptive arguments for a moment, and please just explain in what way someone who releases their code under GPLv3 is forcing anyone to do anything in any sane sense of the word 'force'?
> This whole GPL thing has just been a big headache to me and I regret ever choosing it.
Clearly you didn't read, or understand, the GPL before you chose it for your work, or maybe you just didn't think far enough ahead to realize that the problems that you had are inevitable if you use the GPL. I personally release my code under GPL *specifically* because I don't care about satisfying people who want to link my code into their application without obeying the GPL. I am not going to re-release it under the Lesser GNU Public License, because I chose the GPL *specifically* because of the freedoms that it guarantees users, and switching to the LGPL just backpedals on that in a way that makes one wonder what the point of using GPL in the first place ever was. Now I'm not saying that *you* have to use the GPL, or that the LGPL isn't the right choice for you, or that BSD, MIT, etc, licenses aren't better for you. It's your code, you should be the only person in the world who says what the best license is for your software. But I don't understand why you would talk about the GPL like *it* was the cause of some problems when in fact it was just your choosing of the *wrong* license for your intentions was the real cause.
Also the BSD without the "advert" clause is almost exactly the same thing as public domain. Why you would care th