Torvalds licensing ignorance

Posted Mar 22, 2007 17:22 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
In reply to: Torvalds licensing ignorance by viro
Parent article: The Torvalds Transcript (InformationWeek)

Hang on, Al. I agree that the GPLv3 as of the last draft is really overreaching. But what if someone writes the license that should have been the GPLv3? A respin, not a ground-up rewrite. Call it GPLv2.1. It fixes up a few ambiguities in GPLv2, clarifies some language for international courts, but is otherwise is substantially exactly the the same as the GPLv2.

Would you be against relicensing your code to that?

to post comments

Torvalds licensing ignorance

Posted Mar 22, 2007 17:41 UTC (Thu) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link]

I don't believe that FSF will go for that, at least not until they
*really* give up all hope for v3 being feasible. And probably not
even then, due to perceived loss of face. IOW, it's even less likely
than relicensing of the kernel. Sure, if we run into real trouble
with v2 (i.e. serious failure in court somewhere) we'll have to do
something that would fit your description. But that's (a) unlikely,
as far as we know and (b) it would be v2 + explicit modifications,
not FSF-blessed v2.1.