The Torvalds Transcript (InformationWeek)

Posted Mar 22, 2007 18:08 UTC (Thu) by malor (guest, #2973)
In reply to: The Torvalds Transcript (InformationWeek) by paulpach
Parent article: The Torvalds Transcript (InformationWeek)

I'm not sure how it would apply to a lease, but with a normal sale, you'd be required to give them a master key; they don't have to exercise their right to modify the device running Free Software, but you have to make sure they can do so. You can't reserve rights to yourself that your downstream clients don't have.

No, you as a business can't do everything you want in that situation. That's your cost for using Free Software. If you want to give your customers devices where you have more rights than they do, find code that's under a more permissive license. It's really that simple.

As far GPLv4 not being usable for jails and wars and crap... that's obviously a strawman. This modification of the GPL is merely to make sure that downstream users get all the same rights as everyone else... that no matter where you are in the chain of code transfer, you can do everything that every other person in the chain can do.

That is the spirit of the GPLv2; version 3 simply extends it to provide additional freedom, so that everyone is empowered. You can't hold people hostage with hardware if it's running GPL3 code. Period. If you want to, use code that's licensed more liberally.