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Possible routes to kernel on GPLv3Possible routes to kernel on GPLv3Posted Feb 2, 2007 11:03 UTC (Fri) by sean.hunter (guest, #7920)In reply to: Possible routes to kernel on GPLv3 by sepreece Parent article: GPL 3: An Open-Source Earthquake? (CRN)
While it may or may not be possible theoretically to relicense the Linux kernel, what a lot of people have missed is that the developers would have to *want* to relicense and given that desire, they would have to feel like gpl3 was the one to go for. Neither of these are at all a given.
The kernel developers vary hugely in the extent to which they are interested in the FSF or its goals, but there is a substantial body of key developers who are not very interested in "Debian legal"-type issues and interested primarily in unimpeded cooperation in developing the kernel. For them, the GPL is a pragmatic choice that meets their needs and they choose it for that reason, rather than because they support the wider political and social agenda of the FSF. They just won't want to relicense because they're happy with gpl2 right now. Just like the Linux kernel never asked people to assign copyrights because the key people are happy for everyone to have copyright over the bits they wrote.
Notwithstanding that, if they all did decide that relicensing was worthwhile, the question then becomes "Which License?". Because if you go through the pain, why choose the gpl3 without considering the alternatives? For projects starting 10 years ago, the choice of free licenses boiled down pretty much just to BSD vs GPL. Now there are tons of licenses to choose from so gpl3 would need to be a compelling alternative to all the others.
The fact that the argument over which license to use would be so excruciating might in itself persuade some people not to consider relicensing even if they might otherwise have been in favour of it.
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Possible routes to kernel on GPLv3 Posted Feb 13, 2007 21:15 UTC (Tue) by RareCactus (guest, #41198) [Link] While it may or may not be possible theoretically to relicense the Linux kernel, what a lot of people have missed is that the developers would have to *want* to relicense and given that desire, they would have to feel like gpl3 was the one to go for. Neither of these are at all a given.RMS and his followers haven't "missed" that, they've willfully ignored it. Over and over again, RMS has attempted to claim Linux as his own. Do you remember when he tried to tell everyone to call it "GNU/Linux," because most distributions include some GNU code here and there? Of course, to anyone who knows anything, this is completely unreasonable... you might as well call it BSD/Xorg/MIT/GNU/BellLabs/Linux, because code and ideas came from all of those sources. This is just another power grab. Never mind that RMS had nothing to do with creating Linux-- the kernel developers are "being unreasonable" because they are using their own minds to decide what license is best for their code. Maybe at one point RMS was a programmer. But now, he is a politician and that is what politicians do-- try to take power. You can see it in the way he pushes copyright assignation. You can see it in the way he tries to take credit for other people's work. You can see it in the way he's trying to bully the kernel devs now.
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