Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Linus talks about GPLv3

March 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Linus talks about GPLv3

TAGS: Open Source

Linus Torvalds has gone on the record (again) about his reasons for not supporting GPLv3. He answered a range of questions from InformationWeek's Charlie Babcock. Among some of the gems....

Asked why he doesn't support GPLv3:

First off, I don't even know what the GPLv3 will look like. I would be totally crazy to accept a license for my code sight unseen. I think people who just say "version 2 or any later version" on their code probably don't care about the license of their code enough. Before I say that "yes, you can use my code under license X," I'd better know *what* that license is....

Now, totally independently of that, I'm doubly happy that I long, long since made that decision because at least the drafts of the GPLv3 have been much worse than the GPLv2 is. They've had glaring technical problems (license proliferation with not just one single GPLv3, but "GPLv3 with various additional rights and various additional restrictions"), and while I certainly hope that the final GPLv3 won't have those obvious problems, I've been singularly unimpressed with the drafts.

Finally, the real basic issue is that I think the Free Software Foundation simply doesn't have goals that I can personally sign up to. For example, the FSF considers proprietary software to be something evil and immoral.

Me, I just don't care about proprietary software. It's not "evil" or "immoral," it just doesn't matter.

Linus also talks about a concern I have with GPLv3, as I mentioned in a separate post:

So the FSF and I really don't agree on some very fundamental things. I absolutely love the GPLv2 -- because it embodies that "develop in the open" model. So with the GPLv2, we had a thing where everybody could come around it, and share in that model.

But the FSF seems to want to change the model, and the GPLv3 drafts have not been about developing code in the open, they've been about what you can do with that code. To go back to the science example, it's like saying that not only should the science be peer-reviewed and open, but you also add the requirement that you cannot use it to build a bomb.

We need to be careful about trying to thwart all future wrongdoing with present understanding. It's just fraught with difficulty....

Posted by Matt Asay on March 20, 2007 08:19 AM

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