The Torvalds Transcript (InformationWeek)

Posted Mar 23, 2007 21:07 UTC (Fri) by h2 (guest, #27965)
In reply to: The Torvalds Transcript (InformationWeek) by barbara
Parent article: The Torvalds Transcript (InformationWeek)

barbara and malor, thanks. It's been, especially since the Groklaw rantings by Linus, very easy to see that the foundation of his opposition was clearly not rational, even though he's now of course trying to paint some rational cover for this. But what was a mystery to me was the actual source of that irrational opposition. Now it finally makes sense, even though I'm usually not a big fan of psychological explanations, this one just fits a bit too well. I think there are some other core reasons too, equally irrational, but there's not a lot of point getting into details.

What continues to amaze me is that Linus and the majority of the kernel team day in and day out enjoy the freedoms a license like the GPL explicitly envisioned when it was written, but they seem somehow unable to admit that their actual day to existence is the direct result of the freedom the GPL made a space for. That's the core freedoms, not the fiction of Open Source.

They live good, free, creative lives, almost dreamlike in fact. But they don't seem able to connect the dots. Odd. The fact that they have come to mistake some corporation for the actual real person end user, that's kind of sad, but predictable too, that's the world they live in.

The GPL always restricted the freedoms it imparts enough to make it able to sustain itself against a world that is generally quite hostile to that concept. And BSD type licenses have always been there for users who don't want that restriction. And the world in the past 15 years has grown more aggressive, you can without any problem see patent attacks on the horizon, so failing to take something like that into account would be a serious error on the part of the FSF. And it's not an error they have any plans on making. The entire Tivo thing collapses as soon as you remember that the GPL is all about the rights of the end users, not some corporations. People that is. That also has not changed, nor I hope will it ever.

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The Torvalds Transcript (InformationWeek)

Posted Mar 28, 2007 19:10 UTC (Wed) by wilck (guest, #29844) [Link]

Linus understands the GPLv2 perfectly. His statements in the Newsweek article demonstrate that clearly. He acknowledges that the GPLv2 fits his needs _although_ the intentions of the FSF when they published the GPLv2 may be different from his own.

Whatever Linus' true motivations may be, it's pathetic to dismiss his statements because of psychological speculations. You can disagree with him (I do, too, at least partially), but please respect the man and his arguments.