Linus on Linux, 20 Years In

Radium_ writes "Along with the 20th anniversary of the release of the first Linux kernel, Linuxfr — a French-language Linux website — published an interview with Linus Torvalds. [Interview in English.] The creator of Linux answers questions about Linux kernel licensing, his contributions to the kernel development model and Linux in 2031."

Comments

Re:A really interesting quote from Linus

[aristotle-dude]

BSD license is more free, but does not preserve the freedoms.

Choice of license should depend on your goals. If one of them is philosophy, so be it. If one of them is business, so be it. I always pick the license that I feel best for a project.

It is more free but it does not preserve the freedoms? Who's freedoms? Stop it with the doublespeak/orwellian newspeak. Neither the BSD or GPL have anything to do with the end user. The end user does not give a rats arse about the source code, it's availability or what license it is under. The only people interested are third parties looking for an opportunity to contribute to the codebase and both licenses offer that freedom to those "developers". The BSD also offers the freedom to take that source, use it and incorporate it into a larger closed source product which implements the same standard as the original project.

if you want to push a particular ideology represented by the GNU foundation then you would choose the GPL but if you are interested in pushing forward an open standard that can be implemented and integrated by anyone then you would choose the BSD. Part of the reason why TCP/IP became the standard for the internet is because the stack was release under the BSD license which meant that closed source software vendors could implement the same stack on their platform quickly without fear of viral licenses or contamination.