On Jul 24, 2007, at 1:20 PM, Mike McCarty wrote:
David Brodbeck wrote:Linux *is* under the GPL. But it's under GPL v2. The FSF is pushing hard for Linus to relicense it under GPL v3. The two licenses are not considered compatible.Hmm. That's interesting. Care to elaborate? I thought that Linus retained rights.
Do a Google search on "linux gpl v3" and you'll come across a lot of discussion. The basic gist is that Linus can't relicense the kernel as a whole because not all of the code is his; every individual author/maintainer would have to agree to relicense. Also, he doesn't like some of the anti-DRM provisions in GPL v3 -- he feels they attack the problem from the wrong angle, and that they'd make things like secure update servers untenable by requiring the distribution of private signing keys along with the source code:
http://trends.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/02/02/1636216 http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/1/25/273