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Difficult, but first there has to be a will

Posted Aug 20, 2009 11:30 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544)
In reply to: Devices that phone home by mjg59
Parent article: Devices that phone home

It would be difficult, but not impossible. Mozilla already did it, despite not reaching every contributor. I wrote a piece about relicensing Linux back in 2006.

Free software has legal teams and law firms and legal networks nowadays that can work out the hows of doing it when the time comes, but first we need to convince the Linux kernel devs that freedom is valuable or GPLv3 is useful.

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Posted Aug 20, 2009 12:03 UTC (Thu) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848) [Link]

I agree, it would be possible given such a desire.

Back in 2006, Alan Cox wrote (see http://lwn.net/Articles/169831/):

> > Also, given that several of the copyright holders in the kernel are
> > dead, I don't think we will be able to obtain permission.
>
> It isn't clear that this will be a problem. Very few people specifically
> put their code v2 only, and Linus edit of the top copying file was not
> done with permission of other copyright holders anyway so really only
> affects his code if it is valid at all.
>
> What finally happens is going to depend almost entirely on whether the
> GPL v3 is a sane license or not and on consensus

And Linus in 2007 said (http://lwn.net/Articles/237905/):

> maybe ZFS is worthwhile enough that
> I'm willing to go to the effort of trying to relicense the kernel.

So yes, I agree that the issue of relicensing is primarily social.

To me the tivoisation debate seems to stem from a false assumption that the GPL is there primarily to protect the freedom of developers, whereas its primary purpose is rather the freedom of all users (whether they're using GPLed code to develop a new TV recording product, or have bought said product).

Difficult, but first there has to be a will

Posted Aug 20, 2009 12:57 UTC (Thu) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link]

Linux has already been re-licensed: when Linus removed the "or later" language.

It's sufficient to post a public notice that you're going to make the change, and wait an appropriate amount of time for any copyright holders to object. There's no need to contact, individually, every possible copyright holder.

Difficult, but first there has to be a will

Posted Aug 20, 2009 14:21 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

That's not re-licensing - it's choosing to only distribute further versions under GPLv2, as is expressly permitted in the "or later" boilerplate. Anyone can take any GPL code with that language and redistribute it without.

Difficult, but first there has to be a will

Posted Aug 20, 2009 15:47 UTC (Thu) by fb (subscriber, #53265) [Link]

Linus never removed the "or later" language, as he never had the "or later" thing in his code. The license in the kernel has always been a verbatim copy of GPLv2.

What happened is that the wording "only" was added at some point for clarification.

http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/6/15/262

Difficult, but first there has to be a will

Posted Aug 20, 2009 14:19 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

Not impossible, certainly. Just not likely to happen.