Can we stop this sub-thread?

Eh, screw it. I'm taking the "no replying to bruce" thing to mean _all_ FSF zealots, and not replying to them.

Back when GPLv3 came out there was a giant linux kernel thread about this topic, and a position statement:

http://lwn.net/Articles/200422/

But long before GPLv3 shipped, Linus said he wasn't gonna, and to most of us Linux developers GPL was "the linux kernel license". Nobody cared what the FSF said, and some people collected Linus's public statements on that:

http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/gpl.html

Then when GPLv3 happened we all looked over it and went "you're crazy, you know that?" And the FSF went "you'll come around. You have no choice. Bwahahahaha."

I'm pretty sure I participated in that thread at the time, a quick Google finds the tip of an iceberg:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2007/6/14/567
http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0706.1/287...

But there was more. Oh so much more. The FSF zealots WOULD NOT SHUT UP ABOUT IT, no matter how many different ways we said "no"...

I've blogged about it too, intermittently over the years:
http://landley.net/notes-2006.html#03-12-2006
http://landley.net/notes-2009.html#02-03-2009

In a nutshell it wasn't needed, is far more complicated, tries to control how the code is USED on the target and not just how it's distributed...

Ok, let's go back to the elephant in the room: the FSF had really bad advocates try to cram it down our throats until we went "death first" and stuck our fingers in our ears until they got bored and went away. (Really, the flamewar on the mailing list lasted MONTHS. If you're wondering why "sue them until they see things our way" and "just wait, they'll come around" don't seem like viable tactics to most of the Linux crowd, it's because we've been on the receiving end of them, and didn't like it.)

We do have actual technical reasons. Specifically in the embedded space, the _easy_ way to comply with GPLv3 ("If you can upgrade it, I must be able to, so give me the root password to the world of warcraft server I have an account on") is to cut the jtag traces on the board and burn your code into ROM, so the vendor can't upgrade it either. Is this really something we want to _encourage_?

GPLv2 had 17 years of analysis when GPLv3 shipped, and nobody ever found anything _wrong_ with it. The busybox suits are still enforcing GPLv2, not v3. The FSF went "I am altering the bargain, pray I don't alter it any further", and the rest of us cried "foul".

We don't trust the FSF, it keeps pulling dirty tricks to try to get its way: http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#15-08-2011

I preferred GPLv2 over GPLv3 for a number of reasons, but I don't want to CONSIDER using GPLv3 because I don't want to get any of the FSF on me. They're crazy, and far more interested in persecuting heretics than heathens.

Rob