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Red Herring interviews Linus Torvalds about GPLv3 and the recent open letter by the Maintainers of the Kernel. He makes clear that he agrees with the letter, and that he will not give way on the issues; as far as Linux goes, GPLv3 is stone dead.
Q: Who do you think needs to negotiate with the Free Software Foundation to make the changes happen?
A: They’ve been at it for a year and a half now. I’m not sure this is about negotiation anymore. They certainly knew that they were the radical fringes of the bigger community, and they certainly knew my standpoint on the things they added to the GPL. I think the thing they didn’t expect was just that while I’m a moderate, I’m passionate about being moderate. He also opens a can of legal worms by pointing out that code writers that assigned their GPLv2 copyrights to the FSF, and gave FSF permission to apply revised versions of the GPLto this code, did so with the reservation that the future revisions would be in the same spirit as v2. Torvalds notes:
One of my major gripes with [GPLv3] is that it extends the GPLv2 so much that it’s not at all the same license. If it had been developed as a totally new license, that would be fine, but since the FSF [Free Software Foundation] has been asking people to release their code compatible with “any future versions,” I think it’s a bit inappropriate to add totally new issues to the license.
FSF promised that any such future versions would be “similar in spirit,” but it’s apparently their stance on the spirit that matters, not the stance of the people who they tried to actually reassure with the language—which makes the whole thing rather pointless. In short, the Linux crowd is saying that the FSF cannot apply v3 to any code they gave to the FSF.
posted by James DeLong @ 8:30 AM | Software
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