The third discussion draft of GPL version 3 is scheduled for release at 7 a.m. PDT on Wednesday, Brett Smith, a licensing compliance engineer for the Free Software Foundation said in a mailing list posting Monday. The current GPL 2 governs the rights and restrictions of many open-source and free-software projects, including high-profile ones such as the Linux kernel, Java and MySQL database. A 'last-call' draft is due 60 days after the third discussion draft, and the final GPL 3 will arrive 30 days after that, Smith said.
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Member since:2006-11-08
Although GPLv3 excludes Novell there are other groups against it, notably Linus and the Linux kernel devs. So there would be quite a lot of programming muscle behind a GPLv2 fork of gcc, etc.
It's just a shame that RMS has decided to go this route, but at least he can remain ideologically pure.
Of course one happy side effect of a fork would be an end to the whining about "it should be called GNU/Linux".
Member since:2006-06-15
Member since:2006-06-15
my perception - and I may be wrong. Is that Novel trails RedHat in the certified application space, RedHat is the dominant distro. If Novel do *anything* that makes SLES distros less similar (less compatible) I think a lot of ISVs drop SLES like a hot potato. On top of that Novel wind up maintaining the entire software stack from their own budget- the entire linux business model fails at that point.
Its not obvious to me how an existing agreement MS/Novel affects newly licensed work and the legality of all that - I suspect Novel will move to V3 along with everything and everyone else apart from the kernel, and try to keep their heads down and avoid ruffling feathers in the way that they have done.
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Member since:
2006-03-14
They don't have to do that. They can just fork all the projects they prefer to remain v2. Off the top of my head, glibc and gcc are the most important. If they can just maintain their own branch under a v2 only provision, they could just get away with it. The licence will not revoke the previous licenses. It adds another license.
They can simply fork the projects that are low level enough to cause issues. The higher level things like Samba are not problematic. And they can still be forked.