Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 8th Jan 2008 23:18 UTC
Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system, still has no plans to license the Linux kernel under version three of the GNU GPL anytime soon. Torvalds, a vocal critic of GPL v3 while it was being drafted, prefers GPL v2, he told Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation, Jan. 8 in the first in a series of podcasts titled 'Open Voices', which will feature the industry's top open source and Linux leaders. Torvalds also said Linux was the project that made the split clear between the religious belief in freedom advocated by the Free Software Foundation and the technical superiority that open source and Linux have always been about.
Permalink for comment 295280
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Member since:
2005-07-20
It's funny how people talk about that as if it's so horrible.
You know, Linux originally took the BSD network stack, right? No BSD community was able to get their work back, since GPL is incompatible with so many other existing licenses, but you don't see BSD projects jumping ship to GPL just to get at Linux code, do you?
I think it's pretty childish to upgrade just so you can steal someone else's code. I use the word "steal" here because they can currently view the code and implement their own from scratch implementation if they really want to, just like the BSD guys do, but instead Linus is openly saying "I'll abandon my moral standing on this if it lets me get a hold of their code!" which is, in my opinion, a despicable statement.
And how does being given away freely (without strange use and distrobution clauses) make BSD less of a competitor? It's not as if people choose not to use FreeBSD because someone else might take some of the code. There are several companies that directly contribute to FreeBSD code. People like to say "yes, but more companies work on Linux!" as if it was a good thing that IBM hijacks the kernel for their own use all the time, causing the whole thing to become slower on desktop PCs as a result. Truly it is a wonder that more projects don't go out of their way to whore themselves out to big companies at the expense of the little users. I can't imagine why that doesn't happen?