Why Torvalds is sitting out the GPLv3 process (Linux.com)

Posted Sep 27, 2006 8:42 UTC (Wed) by forthy (guest, #1525)
In reply to: Why Torvalds is sitting out the GPLv3 process (Linux.com) by mingo
Parent article: Why Torvalds is sitting out the GPLv3 process (Linux.com)

Ulrich Drepper: NEVER voluntarily put a project you work on under the GNU umbrella since this means in Stallman's opinion that he has the right to make decisions for the project.

I don't know if Ulrich Drepper ever read the FSF copyright transfer agreement. It's not an exclusive copyright transfer, and puts a lot of trust on you - the original author - rather than on the FSF; the FSF promises to hold up the four freedoms forever. It's basically a way to allow the FSF to sue third parties which violate the license, rather than to have the original author to sue himself. He can, nonetheless, if he likes to.

I'm maintainer of a GNU project (gforth), and I've never ever been stabbed into the back by RMS. Agreed, this is not such an important project as glibc, and it's sufficiently agnostic to the host OS (though it is not completely agnostic WRT GNU/non-GNU environments: we slightly treat GNU ones better). RMS helped us once to clarify the license conditions, which are a bit odd on a Forth system compared e.g. to a C compiler (the further is interactive, and contains an incremental compiler).